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What's up with these odd diamonds? Graphical artifact? http://i.imgur.com/uPxPPI1.png

Those are swaths that the SRTM was unable to survey before its mission ended. There are only a few of them and luckily they're all inside the US where there is already higher quality elevation data available from the USGS to fill them in.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Radar_Topography_Missio...

Probably has to do something with google maps elevation value for those coordinates. https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...

nope it's the SRTM itself. It's a quite low quality data, or more exactly, it's not meant to be used directly, you theoretically need some post-precessing and cross check of this data before use.

Of course normal people don't have the means to do that so we use them directly. I have not personally checked it, but this guys offers something that seems higher quality than the raw SRTM (in particular in the mountains): http://www.viewfinderpanoramas.org/dem3.html

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