Updated ALOS World 3D DEM Now Available Through OpenTopography

May 21, 2021

ALOS World 3D - 30m (AW3D30) is a freely available, downsampled version of a high-resolution (5m) dataset collected by The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The ALOS World 3D - 30m dataset is a digital surface model derived from satellite-based stereo-photogrammetry. OpenTopography has updated its version of AW3D30 from version 1 (May 2015) to version 3.2 (January 2021). This new version is a vast improvement as it fills the null values in the older version with existing DEMs (see Table 1 in the documentation for details), and includes improved algorithms and processing techniques to help detect anomalous values. In addition, OpenTopography has updating its version of AW3D30 with elevations relative to the WGS-84 ellipsoidal vertical datum to use the V3.2 data. This ellipsoidal referenced dataset was converted from the orthometric version using the EGM96 geoid model.

Slider image of colored hillshades of AW3D30 over Iceland data draped on Google Earth imagery. These images compare version 3.2 of the ALOS DEM (left) with the earlier, ALOS DEM version 1 (right). Note that areas shown in green in the version 1 image are no data cells that have been filled in version 3.2.