Elevation Contours Generation, Analysis and Water Scarcity Regions Extraction using DEM

A digital elevation model (DEM) is a digital representation of a terrain's surface commonly for a planet (including Earth), moon, or asteroid created from terrain elevation data. Using the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) interferometry to produce the first near-global high resolution digital elevation model (DEM) of the Earth, SRTM has created an unparalleled set of global elevations that is freely available for modelling, aping and environmental applications. The global availability (about 80% of the Earth surface, covering land masses between 60ºN and 56ºS) makes it the most widely-used set of baseline elevation information for a wide-range of applications and this development has been identified by professionals in the geo-information arena as a significant landmark that will tremendously revolutionize medium-scale topographic mapping. The near-global SRTM digital elevation model (DEM) product was processed and compiled at a resolution of 90m by the Consultative Group for International Agriculture Research Consortium for Spatial Information (CGIAR-CSI) and hosted on a Web portal for free public access and download. In this research paper, the processes of generating contour lines using different elevation data file formats are presented. The elevation file formats, namely, DEM, HGT and IMG are used to represent terrain features like contouring, vertical profiling, hill shading, hypsometric tinting, etc. The errors of particular contour lines have been studied, removed and validated by using APContours.