THE APPLICATION OF SRTM 4.1 RADAR SURVEY DATA AND THEIR DERIVATIVES TO CREATE A GEOMORPHOLOGICAL BASIS LANDSCAPE-INVENTORY MAPS
Classification of the land forms and their cartographic representation are problematic issues of environmental and geographic researches. The area of the Nothern Sikhote-Alin on the Khabarovsk Territory soil is taken as an example. The possibility to use the SRTM 4.1 earth surface radar survey data and their derivatives while creating geomorphological maps with the purpose of landscape-inventory mapping is considered. Via the ArcGIS10.1 software environment a complex geoinformation analysis of the available cartographic materials (geological, geomorphological, topographical maps), as well as data of the digital terrain model based on SRTM 4.1 and their derivatives (surface slopes, height classes at 200, 500, 1000, 2000 m, the depths of the vertical subdivision of the relief in a radius of 2 and 5 km) was carried out. So that a morphogenetic map of the relief of the Northern Sikhote-Alin in a scale of 1: 500 000 was created. While it was being developed, the VRM (Vector Ruggedness Measure) vector of the surface curvature to classify the land forms according to the degree of dissection was used the first time on the territory of the Russian federation. This indicator, which effectively refl two closely related parameters of slope inclination and slope exposure, is based on the three-dimensional vector representation of the difference in the neighboring grid cells. Compared to the similar indicators of LSRI and TRI, the VRM index is less related to the surface slope values. Depending on the size of the sliding window while it is being calculated, it reflects both local and more generalized characteristics of the earth's surface curvature.