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In support of military applications, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has developed standard Digital Terrain Elevation Data (DTED®). This data provides a uniform matrix of terrain elevation values for systems and applications that require terrain elevation and slope. Most government agencies and contractors have DTED available to them, at no cost.
Ternion has developed a Digital Terrain option, which allows FLAMES® users to import DTED into the FLAMES database for use in their FLAMES scenarios. Once imported, the data can be used by models to support their calculations, such as sensor models that consider the terrain in their line-of-sight calculations and ground vehicle models that move a vehicle over the surface of the terrain. The data can also be used by FORGE and FLASH to render 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional displays of the terrain. The Digital Terrain option includes:
The FLAMES DTED Importer, an application that reads one or more NGA DTED data files of any resolution and combines them into a single FLAMES terrain dataset.
Display software for rendering the terrain data in two and three dimensions in both FORGE and FLASH.
A set of functions used in FORGE, FIRE, and FLASH for querying the terrain data for such things as elevation, slope, and point of intersection.
Low resolution DTED for most of the world is available from NGA via the internet. Higher resolution DTED is also available with the appropriate government approval. Once you have your DTED files, you can use the DTED Importer to make the data usable by FLAMES. With the DTED Importer you can:
Import DTED data of any resolution.
Create terrain datasets using data from one or more DTED files.
Create terrain datasets of any size (limited only by the amount of memory and disk space on your computer).
Create a terrain dataset with a resolution higher or lower than the resolution of the imported DTED files.
Compress the terrain data when saving it in the terrain dataset.
Once the DTED data has been imported into a FLAMES digital terrain dataset, you can use FORGE to load the terrain data and make it a part of any FLAMES scenario. With the terrain data loaded, the FORGE two-dimensional display can be rendered on a terrain elevation contour map. FORGE can also use the terrain data in its three-dimensional displays. FORGE tools such as Side View Profile and the Paste Highest Coordinate button also make use of the terrain data.
When a scenario that includes digital terrain is loaded in FIRE, the terrain data is used in all of the functions provided by the FLAMES FTerrain service. These functions can be used by models in line-of-sight calculations and to determine terrain elevation and slope.
FLASH uses digital terrain data to generate the same two-dimensional elevation contour maps and full three-dimensional displays supported by FORGE.
Runtime and development licenses are available for the Digital Terrain option. You need one runtime license for every FLAMES application that loads a digital terrain dataset, including FORGE, FIRE, and FLASH. A development license is required to develop custom applications that load digital terrain datasets.