Estimation of temperature in no meteorological observation area is an important step in land surface process study.Altitude is one of the important proxies to estimate temperature. GTOPO30 is a global digital elevation model (DEM).Elevations in GTOPO30 are regularly spaced at 30-arc seconds (approximately 1 kilometer).GTOPO30 was used to meet the needs of the geospatial data user community for regional and continental scale topographic data. GTOPO30 and China meteorological data are applied in this study to analyze the estimated temperature error in each meteorological station and its pervasion during interpolation.The vertical temperature lapse rate is applied and assumed constant (0.0065℃/m) in China.The result shows that temperature error is between -5.3～+8.6℃ due to altitude difference between GTOPO30 and observed value.Error in point (meteorological station) diffuses to neighboring cells in the process of interpolation.Therefore,estimation of temperature as well as other climate parameter must take into consideration of the altitude difference between DEM and observed value.