DEM Production/Updating Based on Environmental Variables Modeling and Conflation of Data Sources

Abstract: Availability of digital elevation models (DEMs) of a high quality is becoming more and more important in spatial studies. Standard methods for DEM creation use only intentionally acquired data sources. Two approaches which employ various types of data sets for DEM production are proposed: (1) Method of weighted sum of different data sources with morphological enhancement that conflates any additional data sources to principal DEM, and (2) DEM updating methods of modeling absolute and relative temporal changes, considering landslides, earthquakes, quarries, watererosion, building and highway constructions, etc. Spatial modeling of environmental variables concerning both approaches for (a) quality control of data sources, considering regions, (b) pre-processing of data sources, and (c) processing of the final DEM, have been applied. The variables are called rate of karst, morphologic roughness (modeled from slope, profile curvature and elevation), characteristic features, rate of forestation, hydrological network, and rate of urbanization. Only the variables evidenced as significant were used in spatial modeling to generate homogeneous regions in spatial modeling a-c. The production process uses different regions to define high quality conflation of data sources to the final DEM. The methodology had been confirmed by case studies. The result is an overall high quality DEM with various well-known parameters.