Digital terrain elevation data

Definition
Digital terrain elevation data (DTED) is a standard of digital datasets which consists of a matrix of terrain elevation values. This standard was originally developed in the 1970s to support aircraft radar simulation and prediction.

DTED supports many applications, including line-of-sight analyses, terrain profiling, 3-D terrain visualization, mission planning/rehearsal, and modeling and simulation. DTED is a standard National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) product that provides medium resolution, quantitative data in a digital format for military system applications that require terrain elevation.