| Abstract: | Depending on scale, topographic maps depicting the shape of the land surfaces of the Earth are produced from different data sources. National topographic maps at a scale of 1:25 000 (25K maps) produced by General Command of Mapping are used as the base map set in Turkey. This map set, which consists of approximately 5500 sheets, covers the whole country and is produced using photogrammetric methods. Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) created from these maps are also available. Recently, another data source, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) interferometric data, has become more important than those produced by conventional methods. The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) contains elevation data with 3 arc-second resolution and 16 m absolute height error (90 percent confidence level). These data are freely available via the Internet for approximately 80 percent of the Earth's land mass. In this study, SRTM DEM was compared with DEM derived from 25K topographic maps for different parts of Turkey. The study areas, each covering four neighboring 25K maps, and having an area of approximately 600 km2, were chosen to represent various terrain characteristics. For the comparison, DEMs created from the 25K maps were obtained and organized as files for each map sheet in vector format, containing the digitized contour lines. From these data, DEMs in the resolution of 3 arc-second were created (25K-DEM), in the same structure as the SRTM DEM, allowing the 25K-DEMs and the SRTM DEM to be compared directly. The results show that the agreement of SRTM DEM to the 25K-DEM is within about 13 m, which is less than the SRTM's targeted error of 16 m. The spatial distribution of the height differences between SRTM-DEM and the 25K-DEM and correlation analysis show that the differences were mainly related to the topography of the test areas. In some areas, local height shifts were determined. |
