An evaluation of digital elevation modeling in GIS and Cartography

This study considers seven commonly used surface fitting methods within Golden Software and ArcGISTM environments. Using grid sizes of 68 rows by 100 columns (6800 grids) and 680 rows by 1000 columns (680,000 grids) and 294,208 elevation points covering the entire landmass of Nigeria, the study evaluates the performance of these methods in terms of execution time and faithfulness in the representation of the spatial elements. Results show marked differences in time taken to execute the fitting and that Inverse Distance, the Natural Neighbor, the Nearest Neighbor, and Triangulation with Linear Interpolation seem to give the highest level of correspondence or faithfulness.