Sonny's LiDAR Digital Terrain Models of Europe

[SonnyLidarDTM]

Dear Organic Maps Team,

I want to tell you, that I’ve created Digital Terrain Models (DTMs) of many European countries. These are based on precise Opendata LiDAR-elevation data of the country’s Geographical Institutes.

The improvements in accuracy, quality and fine details of these model’s compared to those of satellite-based datasets like SRTM, ASTER, ALOS, COPERNICUS are enormous. Especially in wooded areas, steep rocky terrain or narrow valleys.

Download and use are for free, although I appreciate a donation to support my work 😀

You can find all infos and download links on my website:
https://sonny.4lima.de

[biodranik]

@SonnyLidarDTM thanks for your work! What are the exact steps to get the maximum detailed full-world coverage in an SRTM/ASTER compatible way (a bunch of S83W138.hgt-like files)?

[SonnyLidarDTM]

Please have a detailed look at the mentioned Website, I hope each of your questions will be answered there.

In short:
It's not a world coverage, but one of (most of yet) Europe. Yes, there are models (1" and 3", where 1" is the more detailed one) providing its data in SRTM compatible .hgt files. So you have nothing to convert anymore, just replace the SRTM .hgt with Sonny's .hgt

[biodranik]

@SonnyLidarDTM your hgt files are a subset of worldwide hgt, right? So only European files of our worldwide SRTM coverage will be replaced, right?

How do you test your dataset and confirm that it has the correct data?

[biodranik]

Another question: how to scale your project to worldwide coverage? What help do you need for that?

[SonnyLidarDTM]

Hello, yes my dataset covers "just" Europe, and to speak exately: These countries whose surveying agencies already used LIDAR to survey elevations AND publish their data for free as OpenData. Due to my ressources this project will always be restricted to Europe.

Regarding tests and correctness: Of course the data can be just as accurate as the underlying sourcedata is. But I did the best that my DTMs don't loose any accuracy of the source data. Different persons, map creators, creators of flight simulator scenerys, mountain peakfinder apps etc. already checked its quality, compared it to other sources like SRTM, ASTER etc. and finally choose my DTMs. There are numerous threads in the Web regarding Sonny's DTMs, just google for them or search for the elevation-attribution of a project if they are using Sonny-DTMs ;-)