NASA review finds Polar Geospatial Center EarthDEM meets horizontal accuracy standards

NASA’s Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition program published a quality assessment of the Polar Geospatial Center’s EarthDEM products on August 8, 2026. Subject-matter experts evaluated the Mosaic Tile and Strip Digital Surface Models by benchmarking them against airborne lidar data from sites in the United States and Senegal. The horizontal accuracy results—0.5 m RMSEH for the Strip DSM and 0.3 m RMSEH for the Mosaic Tile—aligned with the specifications provided by PGC and were graded as excellent.

Vertical accuracy showed variation across different land-cover types and depended on cloud-mask metadata, resulting in a basic compliance rating. The report concludes that EarthDEM can support NASA Earth-science research provided its data traits, such as vertical precision and cloud masking, suit the intended application. It also notes that the product documentation is comprehensive, referencing the user guide, peer-reviewed papers, and the PGC GitHub repository.