The Copernicus DEM is a Digital Surface Model (DSM) which represents the bare-Earth surface and all above ground natural and built features. It is based on WorldDEM™ DSM that is derived from TanDEM-X and is infilled on a local basis with the following DEMs: ASTER, SRTM90, SRTM30, SRTM30plus, GMTED2010, TerraSAR-X Radargrammetric DEM, ALOS World 3D-30m. Copernicus Programme provides Copernicus DEM in 3 different instances: COP-DEM EEA-10, COP-DEM GLO-30 and COP-DEM GLO-90 where "COP-DEM GLO-90" tiles and most of the "COP-DEM GLO-30 " tiles are available worldwide with free license. Sentinel Hub provides two instances named COPERNICUS_90 which uses "COP-DEM GLO-90" and COPERNICUS_30 which uses "COP-DEM GLO-30 Public" and "COP-DEM GLO-90" in areas where "COP-DEM GLO-30 Public" tiles are not yet released to the public by Copernicus Programme. Copernicus DEM provides elevation data and can also be used for the orthorectification of satellite imagery (e.g Sentinel 1).

The Copernicus DEM is a Digital Surface Model (DSM) which represents the surface of the Earth including buildings, infrastructure and vegetation. This DSM is derived from an edited DSM named WorldDEM, where flattening of water bodies and consistent flow of rivers has been included. In addition, editing of shore- and coastlines, special features such as airports, and implausible terrain structures has also been applied.

The WorldDEM product is based on the radar satellite data acquired during the TanDEM-X Mission, which is funded by a Public Private Partnership between the German State, represented by the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) and Airbus Defence and Space. OpenTopography is providing access to the global GLO-90 Defence Gridded Elevation Data (DGED) 2023_1 version of the data hosted by ESA via the PRISM service. Details on the Copernicus DSM can be found on this ESA site.

• Previous to July 23rd 2024, OpenTopography was providing access to the Copernicus data through the public AWS S3 bucket established by Sinergise. As of July 23rd 2024, Opentopography is providing the DGED 2023_1 version of GLO-90 as downloaded directly from ESA
• The original gridded data from ESA is in geographic coordinates where the longitudinal cell spacing increases as a function of latitude for regions north of 50N and south of 50S. For more details see the Grid Spacing section of the Copernicus DEM handbook. In order to keep the pixel dimensions uniform, OpenTopography resamples data north of 50 degrees latitude and south of -50 degrees latitude in order to output a consistent 3 Arc-second product for data accessed through the web-interface or API. Users who need data north of 50N or south of 50S, and prefer to use the original, longitude-varying grid spacing can download cloud optimized geotiff (COG) versions of the tiles from our bulk download interface, or download the original data directly from ESA.
• The GLO-90 datasets are available on a free basis for the general public under the terms and conditions of the Copernicus license found here.

The Copernicus DEM is a Digital Surface Model (DSM) which represents the surface of the Earth including buildings, infrastructure and vegetation. This DEM is derived from an edited DSM named WorldDEM&trade, i.e. flattening of water bodies and consistent flow of rivers has been included. Editing of shore- and coastlines, special features such as airports and implausible terrain structures has also been applied. The WorldDEM product is based on the radar satellite data acquired during the TanDEM-X Mission, which is funded by a Public Private Partnership between the German State, represented by the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) and Airbus Defence and Space. More details are available in the dataset documentation. Earth Engine asset has been ingested from the DGED files. Note: See the code example for the recommended way of computing slope. Unlike most DEMs in Earth Engine, this is an image collection due to multiple resolutions of source files that make it impossible to mosaic them into a single asset, so the slope computations need a reprojection.