The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission-Data Validation and Applications

February 2006 marked six years since the fl ight of the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), a joint project of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), with participation from the German Space Agency (DLR) and the Italian Space Agency (ASI). The result of the mission has been an unprecedented near-global high-resolution elevation dataset. Since the Shuttle fl ight, the mapping community has eagerly anticipated the availability of this new source of basic topographic information. All SRTM data production has been completed, and the data are now being used in numerous applications. To help document SRTM data quality and characteristics, and to describe applications that have benefi ted from the data, a collection of papers has been compiled for this special issue.