OS Terrain 50

Wednesday, 3 April, 2013

OS announced this weekend the availability of OS Terrain 50 (T50), a maintained 50m DEM of the UK. This is great news as 50m provides an incredibly useful spatial resolution for a variety of tasks. I have fond memories of working with the older equivalent, Landform Panorama, which provided a good visualisation of terrain given the resolution. The same couldnt be said of Landform Profile which was derived from vector contour data and suffered from all sorts of artefacts. As the Terrain FAQ notes, the data have been produced photogrammetrically using stereo air photos entirely by OS. There is no third party data involved (aka the bastardization of Landform Profile Plus).

Terrain is clearly a new product and almost doesn’t feature on the main terrain data page. I’m assuming this is a (very) new product, as its only on the FAQ page that we see mention of Terrain 5 which will be a 5m DEM to compare to NEXTMap amongst quite a few other products in the marketplace.

It’s great to see OS bringing this to market, albeit a little late and I will be interested to play with T50 more - in particular if it is derived from the T5 product how was this done and is the “information content” actually potentially higher such that we could resample to better resolutions (e.g. Grohman and Steiner (2008))

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