ASTER Global Digital Elevation Map Announcement

Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and industry (METI) and NASA announced the release of the ASTER Global Digital Elevation Model (GDEM) on June 29, 2009. The GDEM was created by stereo-correlating the 1.3 million scene ASTER VNIR archive, covering the Earth’s land surface between 83N and 83S latitudes. The GDEM is produced with 30 meter postings, and is formatted in 1 x 1 degree tiles as GeoTIFF files. Each GDEM file is accompanied by a Quality Assessment file, either giving the number of ASTER scenes used to calculate a pixel’s value, or indicating the source of external DEM data used to fill the ASTER voids.

The GDEM is available for download from NASA’s EOS data archive and Japan’s Ground Data System. ASTER Global DEM and archived data are only available through the links above.

This ASTER product is available at no charge for any user pursuant to an agreement between METI and NASA. For more information about the GDEM, see the Validation Report: ASTER GDEM Validation Summary Report.

Below are a couple of browse images derived from ASTER GDEM globe map data sets. The full data set can be downloaded from the links above.

	GDEM Colorized Map (4,320 x 2,160) TIFF - 27MB PNG - 5MB
	GDEM Black & White Map (4,320 x 2,160) TIFF - 9MB PNG - 2MB