Mt. Whitney Portal Store & Hostel Forums General Mt. Whitney Portal Store Message Board Digital Elevation Model of Whitney?

Does anyone know if the USGS or any other agency has a 3d digital model of Mt. Whitney and surrounding areas? Would anyone know where to find out?

Thanks

The visitors center has low resolution 3D analog model on display : )

The radar scans of earth NASA did a few years ago would be your best bet, i don't know the data format though. There were a few flights in 1994, a new imaging was done in the Feb 2000.

http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/
http://southport.jpl.nasa.gov/general.html

You can download the data via anonymousl ftp from:
ftp://e0srp01u.ecs.nasa.gov

-lance

BeachAV8R had something from one of the flight simulator programs that was very cool. It was 3D. When he comes online, maybe he can provide the link again.

Google Earth can give you an excellent birds-eye-view of the whitney profile. Check out this thread:

GPS Coordinates for MR

The USGS Digital Elevation Model datasets are explained and linked to at http://edc2.usgs.gov/geodata/index.php.

It will take some work to get them into useful formats...a buddy of mine put together a Mathematica toolset to display the DEM data a few years ago but I don't have access to Mathematica any more, so can't use them now.

I haven't looked through the software links on that USGS site to see whether anything looks interesting or not, but it's a place to start.

Not easy to find is it, you certainly need to do some digging around.

Thanks for your help.

Here is a link to Chris (BeachAV8R)'s post with Microsoft Simulator Views.

If they allow my organization to collect the data, the Inyo National Forest will be in possession of a very high-resolution digital elevation model of the area within a few months...

As Lance pointed out the easiest accessible DEM is probably SRTM-data from NASA. They come in 1 and 3 second spacing (30 and 90 meters respectively). This data is useful if not a too much resolution is expected. There is quite some noise involved (which shows up as little hills and holes). In some areas the data is completely off and seems to be interpolated using the surrounding good data. But whole valleys and peaks are missing in some places. I don't know if this is due the bad weather conditions while the data was taken. The edited version 2 has at least the lakes level for example. Until recently this version was only available in 3 second spacing (SRTM-3).

The following pictures were created using the unedited SRTM-1 data with Landsat images overlaid.

Example 1
Example 2

Here is an example with obviously wrong data, the valley with the place called Selden has no exit. In reality the river flows towards Kandersteg.

Example 3

The same area: The valley behind the label 1578m cannot drain towards Kandersteg as it does in reality.

Example 4

I created those before Google Earth offered the resolution of today. If you are just interested in the 3-D image Google Earth is clearly superior.

In addition to the SRTM data, I have downloaded the 1-degree DEM data from USGS (3 arc second spacing) for the entire United States as long as they were available (I don't think they are anymore). This is more than 1GB worth of data. I also have selected areas of the 7.5-minute DEM (I believe 1 arc second spacing, maybe 1/3 sec.) including the Mt. Whitney area. I am more than happy to send you those. The Mt. Whitney quad (as any other) is less then 2MB. But that would have to be next week as I will be out of town until next Tuesday.

I used a program called Kashmir to display the 3-D model and overlay additional information, such as the Landsat images. It is a free software that was created by a Japanese guy. Unfortunately it is not very intuitive and the support in English is not that great. I had a buddy at work form Japan who was instrumental in getting this to work. NT-Space (a consortium of NEC and Toshiba) also published a similar program but I cannot find the link right now. As I remember it was also free and just as Japanese as Kashmir (little English support).

Good luck
Kurt

You can download a 10 meter resolution DEM of the Mount Whitney quad at

www.geocomm.com

The site forces you to register a username and password, but that's all. All of the Inyo County DEM data(and the bulk of the data at the website) is free.

If you see something at the Geocomm site that isn't free, check out that particular state's GIS data offerings via Google, and odds are you'll find that the state offers the same data for free. That's how it has worked for me, anyway.

It is compressed in a tar.gz format, so you'll need a tool to uncompress it.

A useful freeware program for WinXP that is not only a nice DEM viewer, but also decompresses tar.gz files is MicroDEM, which is available at

http://www.usna.edu/Users/oceano/pguth/website/microdem.htm

MicroDEM was my first foray into GIS software. MicroDEM will work OK on older versions of Windows, but is pretty much bug free on WinXP. You can also drape orthophotos and quads onto the DEMs in MicroDEM.

jl