Generation of Large-scale and High-resolution DEMs over Antarctica through a LIDAR survey

NASA, NSF and USGS jointly conducted a LIDAR survey over several sites in the Antarctic Dry Valleys and its vicinity, acquiring numerous surface points by NASA's Airborne Topographic Mapper (ATM) conical laser scanning altimetry system. The data set have high blunder ratio, and the conical scanning pattern resulted large variation of the point densities. Hence, to reduce the undesirable effects due to these characteristics and process the huge number of points with reasonable time and resources, we developed a novel approach to generate large-scale and high-resolution DEMs in robust, efficient and nearly automatic manners. Based on this approach we produced DEMs and then verified them with reference data.