Effect of Terrain Configuration on the Performance of SRTMv3 and ALOS PALSAR DEMs Over the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Nigeria.

Abstract

Digital Elevation Model (DEM) and its resulting parameters are essential terrain related information. DEM and the extracted information (slope, aspect, roughness etc.) have been identified as one of the most important and fundamental variables to various streams of engineering and planning designs which are the hall marks of development all over the world. Thus, to delineate the major surface and subsurface structures for evaluating the Planning framework for the Federal Capital City of Nigeria, analyzing the effects of terrain configuration of Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTMV3) and ALOS PALSAR DEM data is very crucial. Hence this paper aimed at examining the effects of terrain configuration of Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTMV3) and ALOS PALSAR DEM. The methodology involved data acquisition of ALOS PALSAR, SRTMV3 and Ortho DEMs, after which the ALOS PALSAR and SRTMV3 DEMs were resampled to 10m of the Ortho DEM, image classification and then an assessment of the impact of terrain configuration on DEM performance with horizontal profiles was carried out. The results revealed that SRTMV3 v3 performed better with close resemblance with the Ortho DEM on flat and undulating terrain while it underestimated the rolling terrain and overestimated the hilly and mountainous terrain. ALOS PALSAR DEM when compared against the Ortho DEM grossly overestimated all the terrain configuration in the study area. In all, the overall performance of SRTMV3 v3 had a close resemblance in performance to that of the Ortho DEM, while ALOS PALSAR had a significant difference in performance. It was therefore recommended that SRTMV3 v3 should be used as an alternative DEM source where high-resolution elevation data are not readily available.

Keywords: ALOS PALSAR, Digital Elevation Model, SRTM, Terrain modelling.

DOI: 10.7176/JEES/10-6-14

Publication date:June 30^th 2020