Evaluating the Influence of Global Digital Elevation Models (DEMS) for Sentinel-1 Radiometric Terrain Correction (RTC) for Tropical Forest Measurements in Google Earth Engine.

In this paper, the performance of freely available digital elevation models (DEM) when creating Sentinel-1 terrain-corrected γ0 backscatter data for tropical forest measurements was evaluated in Google Earth Engine (GEE). The evaluation metrics considered are the radiometric and geometric quality and topographic normalization quality assessments. All the DEMs produced similar results in detecting stages of deforestation caused by mining in the study area, particularly in flatter terrains. However, the Copernicus 30m DEM is proposed as preferable for steep terrains compared to NASADEM, SRTM, and 30m ALOS World DEM.