Terrain Data

SRTM

The system uses public Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) version 2 data sourced from the NASA 2000 mission which is a modified dataset improved by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGIA).
The modifications removed erroneous spikes although the data still contains a small number of errors in extremely mountainous terrain. The global data is accurate to either 30 metres / 90 feet or 90 metres / 270 feet. The NASA data extends to 60 degrees latitude in both poles with extra polar data courtesy of Cartographer Jonathan De Ferranti BA (http://viewfinderpanoramas.org) who has carefully created the data. The data only depicts the earth’s surface and does not generally include man-made structures however large elongated concrete features (present in the year 2000) have been included. Tall ‘sky scrapers’ were smoothed out of the data as part of the version 2 data scrub but they can still be modelled with the addition of landcover or custom point clutter.

Europe and the USA are covered at 30m resolution. The rest of the world is covered at 90m as standard although some countries like New Zealand are covered at much higher (8m) accuracy by user request. If you have national public data you would like adding please get in touch.

LIDAR

Since 2015, CloudRF's open source engine has supported high resolution LIDAR tiles in ASCII grid format. Many cities in the UK are mapped to 2m accuracy and tiles have been loaded into the system on a request basis for other countries. Testing has proved 50cm accuracy but this is not practical from a hosting or execution point of view so the standard LIDAR resolution is 2m. You can check LIDAR coverage by placing your cursor then clicking the LIDAR button. If a tile exists (Like London or Sheffield) then it will be overlaid on the map. The server will automatically use this tile for planning so long as you are within it.