Roof of the World

The story begins in a computer-aided cartography class. One of the lab projects was to do a map of Sri Lanka.

The project used a DEM to generate a hillshade.

The DEM was a GTOPO30 file.

Reading the ESRI Web site, I discovered that by changing the extension on the GTOPO30 tile from "DEM" to "BIL" that I could directly load it into ArcMap.

I did so.

I discovered that the Himalayas are an impressive mountain range.

Suddenly I wanted to do hillshades of central Asia instead of Sri Lanka.

So... I need data.

Elevations: GTOPO30 will do for starters.

Land cover:

DCW, formatted as e00 files for ArcMap: This is a cool site. [1] It will bundle up the data you request on a country by country basis. You unpack it and away you go.

Borders, Places, Hydro: rivers and lakes