Lukes - 7 
• Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, California; 
• Strike University, Fallon Naval Air Station, Nevada; 
• Red Flag, Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada; 
• Southern California Sea Range. 
Extensive low-to-moderate resolution source data is available for the SW/US Theater. DMA Digital Terrain 
Elevation Data (DTED) Level 1 is the principal source for building the terrain surface providing gridded elevation 
posts at a spacing of 3 arc seconds (approximately 90 meters). DMA Digital Chart of the World (1:1,000,000 
source manuscripts) and Digital Feature Analysis Data (1:250,000 source manuscripts) are also available. USGS 
digital products include Land Use/Land Cover and Digital Line Graphics. Synoptic multispectral imagery is 
available from the NASA Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM). 
4.2.1 Ground Maneuver Box 
Higher-resolution data is available for a 100 kilometer x 150 kilometer Ground Maneuver Box that includes 
the Army National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin and the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center 
(MCAGCC) at Twentynine Palms. Available data includes DMA Digital Terrain Elevation Data (DTED) Level 
2 with elevation posts on 1 arc second grid (approximately 30 meter spacing). DMA Interim Terrain Data 
(ITD)—a digital version of the Tactical Terrain Analysis Data Base (TTADB) 1:50,000-scale factor map overlays— 
provides detailed information on surface materials (soils), surface drainage, vegetation, transportation, obstacles 
and slope. Potential sources of controlled imagery include stereo SPOT panchromatic imagery, USGS stereo aerial 
photography and various types of military mapping and reconnaissance imagery. 
Figure 2 shows a shaded relief terrain display of a 26 kilometer x 26 kilometer portion of the Ground Maneuver 
Box. Note the complexity of the terrain, particularly alluvial fans and washes adjacent to the mountainous areas, 
which require detailed modeling to support tactical line-of-sight ground vehicle operations. 
4.2.2 Range 400 
To support modeling infantry combat in ADS, a very high resolution data set has been assembled over a live fire 
range, Range 400, at Twentynine Palms. For a limited area (2.2 kilometer x 3.3 kilometer), a one-meter Digital 
Elevation Model (DEM) and associated digital orthophoto was generated from large-scale aerial photography 
and extensive geodetic control. The experiment data set was generated by F. Raye Norvelle at the U.S. Army 
Topographic Engineering Center using the Iterative Orthophoto Refinement (IOR) Method. 4 This unique data set 
is the object of on-going efforts in automated TIN generation, terrain fidelity assessment, line-of-sight sensitivity 
analysis and terrain analysis. Figure 3 shows four views of a TIN surface generated from the original one-meter 
DEM. Views (a) and (b) show the live fire range including access roads and the surrounding mountainous area. 
View (c) shows a detail of a drainage wadi, which provide cover and concealment for approaching infantry and is 
an obstacle to vehicles. View (d) details a defensive position that has been modeled interactively. It is important 
to model such features as accurately as possible due to their significance in dismounted infantry simulation. This 
raises interesting issues both in the acquisition of unusually high fidelity DEM’s and in how to generate polygonal 
surface descriptions that can be efficiently visualized. 
5 Opportunities for Cartographic Technology Development 
In the context of cartographic support for Advanced Distributed Simulation, several topical areas provide a 
rich set of basic and applied research problems that can serve to focus on-going and future cartographic image 
understanding research.