Alaska DEM (AKDEM)

The primary purpose of the Alaska DEM project was to evaluate results of using multiple mapping techniques on remote sensing data acquired at different resolutions to generate topographic maps at various scales for selected portions of the state of Alaska. The objective was to provide the state agencies with guidelines that enable them to determine the scale, accuracy and costs needed for various state mapping tasks, and to prepare a strategy to complete the operational mapping of the entire state of Alaska. We used data sets from the ERS tandem mission and SRTM (regional scale) and AIRSAR data (local scale) and compared the results from the various sources in terms of scale, accuracy and costs considering the terrain type. We took differential GPS measurements as ground controls.

My contribution to this project was the design and implementation of the production system. The production system is essentially a driver program that runs the entire interferometric processing chain for ERS tandem mission data from a configuration file. It includes some measures to interrupt the processing if the intermediate products is of inferior quality. It reports processing errors in the processing log file. This helps to troubleshoot and streamline the processing chain. Results of this work were presented at IGARSS in 2002: