Digital Elevation Models and Orthomosaics of Institut für Angewandte Geodäsie (IfAG) Aerial Imagery from 1989

Data Description:

The dataset consists of high-resolution Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) and orthomosaics derived from 1989 aerial imagery acquired by the Institut für Angewandte Geodäsie (IfAG), Germany. The dataset covers approximately 12,000 km² of the western Antarctic Peninsula and surrounding islands between 66–68°S, including the mainland Antarctic Peninsula, Pourquoi Pas Island (PPI), and Adelaide Island. The DEMs and orthomosaics were generated using Multiview Structure from Motion (MV-SfM) techniques, with coregistration to the Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica (REMA) and validation against ICESat-2 ATL06 L3A Land Ice Height data from 2020–2021. The DEMs have a spatial resolution of 10 m and vertical accuracies better than 6 m (NMAD) with respect to REMA and 8 m (NMAD) with respect to ICESat-2 on ice-free areas. Orthomosaics are provided at the native resolution of the imagery (approximately 0.875 m ground sampling distance).

Additional Information:

We provide 3 DEMs- mainland Antarctic Peninsula, Pourquoi Pas Island (PPI), and Adelaide Island

DEM data is good (clouds or artefacts are masked out), where the "bad_pixels_mask" raster value is 1

We provide orthomosaics in 8 TIFF files 

We provide pre-coregistration point clouds in 8 LAS files 

We provide initial camera locations, which are manually digitized from the survey index map, in a CSV file named "Initial_camera_locations_IfAG1989.csv"

All DEMs and Orthomosaic rasters are given in the EPSG:3031 coordinate system.  Vertical reference for DEMs is height above the WGS84 ellipsoid. Elevation values are expressed in meters. 

File names and their respective additional information are in the file named "Thota_IfAG_dataset_2025_metadata.csv"

The dataset is derived using the open-source repository Historical Structure from Motion (https://zenodo.org/records/5510870). 

More details about processing information can be found in the Journal Article (will be added here soon)