The bulk of the data for this analysis was downloaded from the Solar and Wind Energy Resource Assessment (SWERA) website. These datasets were created as part of the Central American Energy Resource Mapping Activity by the United States Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) for the United Nations Environment Programme. The data that I downloaded was compiled into SWERA's Nicaragua Geospatial Toolkit which is a grouping of datasets that are intended for use in the investigation of solar and wind energy potential in the country. This data is in ESRI shapefile and grid formats projected in the Lambert Azimuthal Equal Area projection based on the World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS84) ellipsoid.

I also obtained 3 arc-second data that was produced by the Shuttle Radio Topography Mission (SRTM) conducted by NASA. I was able to download this data in 5 X 5 degree tiles in ASCII format from the Consultative Group for International Agriculture Research (CGIAR) website. The projection is the Geographic Coordinate System (GCS) using the WGS84 datum. I downloaded the two tiles that were necessary to provide complete coverage of Nicaragua and imported them to ArcGIS 9 using the ASCII to Raster tool. I performed a couple additional processing functions before I considered the data ready to be used as an input in my analysis models. First I used the Mosaic to New Raster tool to incorporate the two files together and minimize the apparent offset along the line where the two tiles meet. Then I used the Extract by Mask tool to extract only the raster data that was located inside the country boundary identified by a shapefile in the SWERA data set. This resulted in a 90 meter resolution DEM for all of the land in Nicaragua.