DTED – Military Elevation Data
Driver short name
DTED
Driver built-in by default
This driver is built-in by default
GDAL supports DTED Levels 0, 1, and 2 elevation data for read access. Elevation data is returned as 16 bit signed integer. Appropriate projection and georeferencing information is also returned. A variety of header fields are returned dataset level metadata.
Driver capabilities
Supports CreateCopy()
This driver supports the GDALDriver::CreateCopy()
operation
Supports Georeferencing
This driver supports georeferencing
Supports VirtualIO
This driver supports virtual I/O operations (/vsimem/, etc.)
Read Issues
Read speed
Elevation data in DTED files are organized per columns. This data organization doesn’t fit very well with some scanline oriented algorithms and can cause slowdowns, especially for DTED Level 2 datasets. By defining GDAL_DTED_SINGLE_BLOCK=TRUE, a whole DTED dataset will be considered as a single block. The first access to the file will be slow, but further accesses will be much quicker. Only use that option if you need to do processing on a whole file.
Georeferencing Issues
If the horizontal datum specified in the DTED file is WGS84, the DTED driver will report WGS 84 as SRS.
If the horizontal datum specified in the DTED file is WGS72, the DTED driver will report WGS 72 as SRS and issue a warning.
If the horizontal datum specified in the DTED file is neither WGS84 nor WGS72, the DTED driver will report WGS 84 as SRS and issue a warning.
Configuration options
This paragraph lists the configuration options that can be set to alter the default behavior of the DTED driver.
REPORT_COMPD_CS: (GDAL >= 2.2.2). Can be set to TRUE to avoid stripping the vertical CS of compound CS when reading the SRS of a file. Default value : FALSE
Checksum Issues
The default behavior of the DTED driver is to ignore the checksum while
reading data from the files. However, you may specify the environment
variable DTED_VERIFY_CHECKSUM=YES
if you want the checksums to be
verified. In some cases, the checksum written in the DTED file is wrong
(the data producer did a wrong job). This will be reported as a warning.
If the checksum written in the DTED file and the checksum computed from
the data do not match, an error will be issued.
Creation Issues
The DTED driver does support creating new files, but the input data must be exactly formatted as a Level 0, 1 or 2 cell. That is the size, and bounds must be appropriate for a cell.
GeoTransform
The DTED_APPLY_PIXEL_IS_POINT=TRUE
environment variable can be set (GDAL >=
3.1) to apply a pixel-is-point interpretation to the data when reading
the geotransform.
See Also
Implemented as
gdal/frmts/dted/dteddataset.cpp
.