HIGH RESOLUTION DEMs AND ORTHO-IMAGE BASEMAPS FOR LOCAL GOVERNMENT APPLICATIONS

STATEMENT OF PROBLEM Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) are the digital representation of topographic and/or manmade features located on the surface of the earth. DEMs are widely used for hydrologic analyses, resource management, transportation planning, earth sciences, and environmental assessment. Increased use of DEMs in these wide-ranging applications has led to greater need for higher resolution and higher accuracy digital elevation data. This is especially true for local government applications such as basemap generation/registration, stormwater management, watershed mapping, water-quality assessment, and flood-risk assessment because of the fine horizontal and vertical spatial scale of most features (streets, buildings, localized watersheds, etc.).