A new research article led by Petra Pracná from the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, co-authored by Vítězslav Moudrý, Eliška Šárovcová, Kateřina Gdulová, and international partners, presents an important step toward creating more accurate global terrain models.
The study, published in Science of Remote Sensing and funded by the Horizon Europe project EarthBridge, investigates how combining NASA’s ICESat-2 and GEDI laser altimetry data can produce 90-metre Digital Terrain Models (DTMs) with unprecedented precision.
By merging these complementary spaceborne lidar datasets, the team achieved terrain accuracy comparable to the global Copernicus DEM and even better in forested landscapes, where traditional radar-based models often fail to capture true ground elevation.
“Our results show that combining ICESat-2 and GEDI brings us closer to producing truly global, high-accuracy terrain models derived entirely from satellite laser data,” says lead author Petra Pracná.
🔗 Read the full open-access article: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.srs.2025.100293
