I suspect that it would be very hard and not result in a good product. Its not designed to get elevation and the relatively course resolution would result in fairly high uncertainty if you could use what I suspect would essentially be photogrammetric techniques. There are certainly existing global digital elevation models that would be better. Take a look at "Global 30-Arc-Second Elevation Data Set" and see if it suits your needs. It has elevations about every km. For many areas of the world you can probably get finer resolution.

Thank you Dr. Casson Stallings for your suggestion and answer. However, regional change detection studies need to have your own choice of dataset. If I want to derive elevation differences to estimate glaciers mass balance for the last decade in Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) region then it is needed to have elevation data for the current and previous year for example (year 2000 and 2013). What may be the possible alternate for this study.

DEM needs stereo images and MODIS have the ability to capture images from side view as well. Images acquired from left and right side with nearly same angle can be used to generate a DEM.

The date and time of the imagery acquisition are different for side view images. But still its possible to use combination of aqua and terra or just aqua/ terra different date and time images for the proposed product. Although the spatial resolution be poor but for regional or global regular temporal scale, it may be a useful product to use.

Actually, GTOPO 30 have been created in 1996 and its accuracy in valleys is a question mark. Also SRTM have been generated in 2002. Whereas my interest is in temporal glaciers volume variation analysis of HKH region. For this purpose I thoroughly exploted globally available catalogues and unfortunately, didn't get data of my interst :(. So I started working on MODIS exploration.

MODIS is not the best instrument to derive a DEM

You can get ground elevation from MOD03 Geolocation product at 1km spatial resolution.

For you reference:

http://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/dataprod/dataproducts.php?MOD_NUMBER=03

Thank you all for your interest. Mr Muhammad Bilal@: I'll check the MOD03 data available. Thank you again for your answer.

For documenting your main interrogation, which is, if I understood well, the estimation of glaciers mass balance over time, I recommend you a paper by Fujita et al. It has just been published, at

http://www.nat-hazards-earth-syst-sci.net/13/1827/2013/nhess-13-1827-2013.pdf

Hi,

Sentinel-1 has a very small baseline so topography mapping will not be very good. This mission is for time series analysis where small baseline is very important.

You can use many other available DEM such as SRTM, ALOS, ASTER, TDX. GTOPO etc.

Best wishes,

Kapil