Global Relief Model

A global relief model, sometimes also denoted as global topography model or composite model, combines digital elevation model (DEM) data over land with digital bathymetry model (DBM) data over water-covered areas (oceans, lakes) to describe Earth’s relief. A relief model thus shows how Earth’s surface would look like in the absence of water or ice masses.

The relief is represented by a set of heights (elevations or depths) that refer to some height reference surface, often the mean sea level or the geoid. Global relief models are used for a variety of applications including visualisation, geological, geomorphological and geophysical analyses, gravity field modelling as well as geo-statistics.

Global relief models are always based on combinations of data sets from different remote sensing techniques. This is because there is no single remote sensing technique that would allow measurement of the relief both over dry and water-covered areas. Elevation data over land is often obtained from LIDAR or inSAR measurements, while bathymetry is acquired based on SONAR and altimetry. Global relief models may also contain elevations of the bedrock (sub-ice-topography) below the ice shields of Greenland and Antarctica. Ice sheet thickness, mostly measured through ice-penetrating RADAR, is subtracted from the ice surface heights to reveal the bedrock.

While digital elevation models describe Earth’s land topography often with 1 to 3 arc-second resolution (e.g., from the SRTM or ASTER missions), the global bathymetry (e.g., SRTM30_PLUS) is known to a much lesser spatial resolution in the kilometre-range. The same holds true for models of the bedrock of Antarctica and Greenland. Therefore, global relief models are often constructed at 1 arc-min resolution (corresponding to about 1.8 km postings), Some products such as the 30 and 15 arc-sec resolution SRTM30_PLUS/ SRTM15_PLUS grids offer higher resolution to adequately represent SONAR depth measurements where available.

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