The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences. Vol. XXXVII. Part Bl. Beijing 2008 
reservoirs. In addition, it is not easy to rectify the elevation 
errors in glacial, conifer forest and sandy desert settings 
because of their irregular distributions. 
Generally speaking, SRTM is a successful space-based 
topographic surveying practice. The InSAR topographic 
mapping represented by SRTM, as well as LiDAR, can solve 
the problems in aerospace based surveying and mapping 
especially along national borders. Also, we are expecting the 
NASA’s openness to SRTM1 around the world. It can be 
certain that given its continuous and widespread development, 
human exploration and understanding of the earth's surface, 
including its origin, evolution and future form, will be 
advanced through the use of new remote sensing technologies. 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT 
This work was conducted by the Education Ministry's ‘Chunhui 
Project’, China (Z2004-1-62006) and Lanzhou University's 
‘Cuiying Project’. I would like to thank ESRI China, Inc. for 
the site license project of ArcGIS to Lanzhou University with 
their support for the SRTM data used in this paper. I would like 
to thank Dr. L. Bian, at Department of Geography, State 
University of New York, at Buffalo, and her college for their 
advices on preparing this paper. 
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