DTED (Digital Terrain Elevation Data) Reader/Writer

Licensing options for this format begin with FME Professional Edition.

Overview

The DTED Digital Elevation Map (DEM) Reader module provides FME with access to data in the DTED format. This format is documented in the U.S. military standard MIL-PRF-89020B.

DTED is a continuous numeric raster format whose data is stored in two byte signed integers. The value -32767 is considered to be “no data”.

More information on the DTED format can be found on the NIMA website at:

http://www.nga.mil/ast/fm/acq/89020B.pdf

Reader Overview

FME considers a single DTED file, or a folder containing a list of DTED files, to be a dataset. DTED files are raster files containing elevation data. Each elevation sample in each file is translated to a three-dimensional (3D) FME point feature or translated into a single raster feature.

Writer Overview

FME will write a set of point features or a set of raster features to one or more DTED cell files in a folder (the DATASET). The folder need not exist before the translation occurs. Any old files in the folder may be overwritten with the new feature data without warning. New cell files are created as needed depending on the locations of point features received by the writer.

The LEVEL (resolution), and various other metadata for the output files can be controlled with mapping file keywords.

The writer can optionally fill in missing values in the output file by inverse distance weighted interpolation.

Note: The DTED writer assumes that all incoming points and raster are in the LL-84 (lat/longWGS84) coordinate system. If this is not the case, the results will be inaccurate.