SRTM - The German Processing Facility and the Products

Abstract

In February 2000 the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission mapped 80% of the earth surface using the first space borne single pass SAR interferometer. On board were two radar systems, a US system operating in C-band and a German/Italian system operating in X-band. At the German Aerospace Center (DLR) the global X-band data set is processed to a global digital elevation model (DEM). For this enormous processing task, a processing and archiving facility was developed which is unique in many ways. The SAR processing, the interferometric processing and the DEM geocoding are performed on modular high performance pipelined systems, all developed at DLR. These systems are integrated in the new Data and Information Management System (DIMS), a distributed catalog and storage system using latest JAVA/CORBA technology and a large scale robot archive. Currently, the German processing and archiving facility at DLR is in the process of calibrating the recorded data. The final DEM products will be accessible to users on the internet after a 2 year processing phase. The paper describes the overall processing system, focuses on the interferometric processing, and shows the properties of first sample products.