Performance Estimation of Aster Global DEM Depending upon the Terrain Inclination

A digital elevation model (DEM) is a source of immense three dimensional data revealing topographic characteristics of any region. The performance of a DEM can be described by accuracy and the morphologic conformity. Both depend upon the quality of data set, the used production technique and the roughness of the terrain. The global DEM of ASTER (Advanced Space-borne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) was released to public utilization as free of charge on June 2009. It covers virtually overall the globe using 1 arc-second posting interval. Especially easy availability renders ASTER Global DEM (GDEM) one of the most popular and considerable global topographic data for scientific applications. From this point of view, the performance of ASTER GDEM has to be estimated for different kinds of topographies. Accordingly, six test fields from Spain (Barcelona) and Turkey (Istanbul and Zonguldak) have been preferred depending upon the terrain inclination. Thus, the advantages and disadvantages of the DEM product have been proved by means of a group of advanced performance analysis. The analyses indicate that the performance of ASTER GDEM is quite satisfying at urban areas because of flat topography. On the other hand, terrain slope has negative effect on the results. Especially steep, mountainous, forestry topographic formations and the regions which have sudden changes at the altitude have lower accuracy.