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ASTER

Overview

The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) global DEM dataset is a joint effort between the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) of Japan and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the US.

ASTER GDEM is a 1 arc-second resolution, corresponding to a resolution of about 30m at the equator. Coverage is provided from from -83 to 83 degrees latitude.

ASTER elevation map
Render of ASTER elevation. Source.

Adding 30m ASTER to Open Topo Data

Make a new folder for the dataset:

mkdir ./data/aster30m

Download the files from USGS into ./data/aster30m . Extract the zip archives keeping the _dem.tif files and removing the _num.tif files.

To make downloading a bit easier, here's a list of the 22,912 URLs: aster30m_urls.txt.

Create a config.yaml file:

datasets:
- name: aster30m
  path: data/aster30m/

Rebuild to enable the new dataset at localhost:5000/v1/aster30m.

make build && make run

Public API

The Open Topo Data public API lets you query ASTER GDEM 30m for free:

curl https://api.opentopodata.org/v1/aster30m?locations=57.688709,11.976404

{
  "results": [
    {
      "elevation": 45.0, 
      "location": {
        "lat": 57.688709, 
        "lng": 11.976404
      },
      "dataset": "aster30m"
    }
  ], 
  "status": "OK"
}

The Public API uses version 3 of the DEM (GDEM 003).