The Digital Elevation Model over Europe from the GMES RDA project (EU-DEM) is a Digital Surface Model (DSM) representing the first surface as illuminated by the sensors. The EU-DEM dataset is a realisation of the Copernicus programme, managed by the European Commission, DG Enterprise and Industry.

Digital Terrain Model for Continental Europe based on the three publicly available Digital Surface Models and predicted using an Ensemble Machine Learning (EML). EML was trainined using GEDI level 2B points (Level 2A; "elev_lowestmode") and ICESat-2 (ATL08; "h_te_mean"): about 9 million points were overlaid vs MERITDEM, AW3D30, GLO-30, EU DEM, GLAD canopy height, tree cover and surface water cover maps, then an ensemble prediction model (mlr package in R) was fitted using random forest, Cubist and GLM, and used to predict most probable terrain height (bare earth). Input layers used to train the EML include:

• "lcv_bare.earth_glcf.landsat": UMD GLAD bare earth estimate for year 2010 based on Landsat time series,
• "dtm_elev.dsm_alos.aw3d": Digital Surface Model based on ALOS AW3D,
• "dtm_canopy.height_glad.umd": UMD GLAD canopy height for 2019 based on GEDI data,
• "dtm_elev.dsm_eudem.eea": Copernicus EU DEM based on the SRTM and ASTER DEMs,
• "hyd_surface.water_jrc.gswe": JRC Global Surface Water Explorer surface water probability based on the Landsat time-series,
• "lcv_landcover.12_pflugmacher2019": land cover map of Europe at 30 based on Pflugmacher et al. (2019),
• "lcv_tree.cover_umd.landsat_2000": forest tree cover for year 2000 based on the Global Forest Change data,
• "lcv_tree.cover_umd.landsat_2010": forest tree cover for year 2010 based on the Global Forest Change data,

Detailed processing steps can be found here. Read more about the processing steps here.

Training data set can be obtained in the file "gedi_elev.lowestmode_2019_eumap.RDS". The initial linear model fitted using the four independent Digital Surface / Digital Terrain models shows:

Residuals:
 Min    1Q  Median    3Q   Max 
-124.627  -1.097  0.973  2.544  59.324 
 
Coefficients:
 Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)  
(Intercept)     -1.6220640 0.0032415 -500.4  <2e-16 ***
 eu_dem25m_     -0.1092988 0.0005531 -197.6  <2e-16 ***
 eu_AW3Dv2012_30m_  0.0933774 0.0005957  156.7  <2e-16 ***
 eu_GLO30_30m_    0.2637153 0.0006062  435.1  <2e-16 ***
 eu_MERITv1.0.1_30m_ 0.7496494 0.0005009 1496.6  <2e-16 ***
 ---
 Signif. codes: 0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1

Residual standard error: 7.059 on 9588230 degrees of freedom
(2046196 observations deleted due to missingness)
Multiple R-squared: 0.9996,  Adjusted R-squared: 0.9996 
F-statistic: 5.343e+09 on 4 and 9588230 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16

Which show that MERIT DEM (Yamazaki et al., 2019) is the most correlated DEM with GEDI and ICESat-2, most likely because it has been systematically post-processed and majority of canopy problems have been removed. Summary results of the model training (mlr::makeStackedLearner) using all covariates (including canopy height, tree cover, bare earth cover) shows:

Variable: elev_lowestmode.f 
R-square: 1 
Fitted values sd: 333 
RMSE: 6.54 

Ensemble model:
Call:
stats::lm(formula = f, data = d)

Residuals:
   Min    1Q  Median    3Q   Max 
-118.788  -0.871  0.569  1.956 165.119 

Coefficients:
       Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)  
(Intercept) -0.198402  0.003045 -65.15  <2e-16 ***
regr.ranger 0.452543  0.001117 405.04  <2e-16 ***
regr.cubist 0.527011  0.001516 347.61  <2e-16 ***
regr.glm   0.020033  0.001217  16.47  <2e-16 ***
---
Signif. codes: 0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1

Residual standard error: 6.544 on 9588231 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.9996,  Adjusted R-squared: 0.9996 
F-statistic: 8.29e+09 on 3 and 9588231 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16

Which indicates that the elevation errors are in average (2/3rd of pixels) between +1-2 m. The variable importance based on Random Forest package ranger shows:

Variable importance:
        variable  importance
4  eu_MERITv1.0.1_30m_ 430641370770
1   eu_AW3Dv2012_30m_ 291483345389
2     eu_GLO30_30m_ 201517488587
3      eu_dem25m_ 132742500162
9 eu_canopy_height_30m_  5148617173
7       bare2010_  2087304901
8    treecover2000_  1761597272
6    treecover2010_  141670217

The output predicted terrain model includes the following two layers:

• "dtm_elev.lowestmode_gedi.eml_mf": mean estimate of the terrain elevation in dm (decimeters) filtered using Gaussian filter and 2x pixel window in SAGA GIS,
• "dtm_elev.lowestmode_gedi.eml_md": standard deviation of the independently fitted stacked predictors quantifying the prediction uncertainty in dm (decimeters),

The predicted elevations are based on the GEDI data hence the reference water surface (WGS84 ellipsoid) is about 43 m higher than the sea water surface for a specific EU country. Before modeling, we have corrected the reference elevations to the Earth Gravitational Model 2008 (EGM2008) by using the 5-arcdegree resolution correction surface (Pavlis et al, 2012).

All GeoTIFFs were prepared using Integer format (elevations rounded to 1 m) and have been converted to Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs using GDAL.

Disclaimer: The output DTM still shows forest canopy (overestimation of the terrain elevation) and has not been hydrologically corrected for spurious sinks and similar. This data set is continuously updated. To report a bug or suggest an improvement, please visit here. To access DTM derivatives at 30-m, 100-m and 250-m please visit here. To register for updates please subscribe to: https://twitter.com/HarmonizerGeo.

This is a cropped DTM version (with Frame2c) for providing topographic backgrouds on EEA maps. This is a hillshade of global digital elevation model (DEM) with a horizontal grid spacing of 30 arc seconds (approximately 1 kilometer).

The EU-DEM is a Digital Surface Model (DSM) representing the first surface as illuminated by the sensors. EU-DEM covers the EEA39 countries and it has been produced by a consortium led by Indra, Intermap edited the EUDEM and AGI provided the water mask. The EU-DEM is a 3D raster dataset with elevations captured at 1 arc second postings (2.78E-4 degrees) or about every 30 meter. It is a hybrid product based on SRTM and ASTER GDEM data fused by a weighted averaging approach. Ownership of EU-DEM belongs to European Commision, DG Enterprise and Industry. The projection onto an Inspire compliant grid of 25m resolution has been performed by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission.

The EU-DEM v1.1 is a resulting dataset of the EU-DEM v1.0 upgrade which enhances the correction of geo-positioning issues, reducing the number of artefacts, improving the vertical accuracy of EU-DEM using ICESat as reference and ensuring consistency with EU-Hydro public beta.

EU-DEM v1.1 is available in GeoTIFF 32 bits format. It is a contiguous dataset divided into 100x100 km tiles, resulting in a total of 1992 tiles of 4000x4000 pixel at 25m resolution with vertical accuracy: +/- 7 meters RMSE. The tiles have been grouped in big regions: - EUDEM2_ASIA (Türkiye) - EUDEM2_ATLAN (Hondo and Fr_Islands) - EUDEM2_BRITAIN (Thames, Shannon and Tweed) - EUDEM2_EUROPE_1 (Duero, Ebro, Tajo, Guadalquivir and Jucar) - EUDEM2_EUROPE_2 (Tirso, Mesima, Tevere and Po) - EUDEM2_EUROPE_3 (Garonne, Rhone, Loire, Seine and western Rhine) - EUDEM2_EUROPE_4 (Danube) - EUDEM2_EUROPE_5 (Skjern, Nemunas, Vistula, Oder, Elbe and Eastern Rhine)

             - EUDEM2_EUROPE_6 (Bulgaria and Pinios)
- EUDEM2_ICELAND (Iceland)
- EUDEM2_SCAND (Vorma, Gota, Angerman, Tana,
             Kemi and Neva)
- EUDEM2_SOUTH_AMERICA (Fr_Guiana)

EU-DEM v1.1 upgrade was coordinated by the European Environment Agency (EEA) in the frame of the EU Copernicus programme.

Overview:
The Copernicus DEM is a Digital Surface Model (DSM) which represents the surface of the Earth including buildings, infrastructure and vegetation. The original GLO-30 provides worldwide coverage at 30 meters (refers to 10 arc seconds). Note that ocean areas do not have tiles, there one can assume height values equal to zero. Data is provided as Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs. Note that the vertical unit for measurement of elevation height is meters.

The Copernicus DEM for Europe at 3 arcsec (0:00:03 = 0.00083333333 ~ 90 meter) in COG format has been derived from the Copernicus DEM GLO-30, mirrored on Open Data on AWS, dataset managed by Sinergise (https://registry.opendata.aws/copernicus-dem/).

Processing steps:
The original Copernicus GLO-30 DEM contains a relevant percentage of tiles with non-square pixels. We created a mosaic map in VRT format and defined within the VRT file the rule to apply cubic resampling while reading the data, i.e. importing them into GRASS GIS for further processing. We chose cubic instead of bilinear resampling since the height-width ratio of non-square pixels is up to 1:5. Hence, artefacts between adjacent tiles in rugged terrain could be minimized:

gdalbuildvrt -input_file_list list_geotiffs_MOOD.csv -r cubic -tr 0.000277777777777778 0.000277777777777778 Copernicus_DSM_30m_MOOD.vrt

In order to reduce the spatial resolution to 3 arc seconds, weighted resampling was performed in GRASS GIS (using r.resamp.stats -w and the pixel values were scaled with 1000 (storing the pixels as integer values) for data volume reduction. In addition, a hillshade raster map was derived from the resampled elevation map (using r.relief, GRASS GIS). Eventually, we exported the elevation and hillshade raster maps in Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) format, along with SLD and QML style files.

Projection + EPSG code:
Latitude-Longitude/WGS84 (EPSG: 4326)

Spatial extent:
north: 82:00:30N
south: 18N
west: 32:00:30W
east: 70E

Spatial resolution:
3 arc seconds (approx. 90 m)

Pixel values:
meters * 1000 (scaled to Integer; example: value 23220 = 23.220 m a.s.l.)

Software used:
GDAL 3.2.2 and GRASS GIS 8.0.0 (r.resamp.stats -w; r.relief)

Original dataset license:
https://spacedata.copernicus.eu/documents/20126/0/CSCDA_ESA_Mission-specific+Annex.pdf

Processed by:
mundialis GmbH & Co. KG, Germany (https://www.mundialis.de/)

The EU-DEM v1.0 is a digital surface model that represents the first surface of the EEA39 countries as captured by sensors. It is a hybrid product created by combining SRTM and ASTER GDEM data using a weighted averaging technique.

A 'Digital Elevation Model (DEM)' is a 3D approximation of the terrain's surface created from elevation data. The term 'Digital Surface Model (DSM)' represents the earth's surface and includes all objects including e.g. forests, buildings. The Digital Elevation Model over Europe from the GMES Reference Data Access project (EU-DEM) is a Digital Surface Model (DSM) representing the first surface as illuminated by the sensors. EU-DEM covers the 39 member and cooperating countries of EEA. The EU-DEM is a hybrid product based on SRTM and ASTER GDEM data fused by a weighted averaging approach. Different products have been derived from the EU-DEM, including raster’s of the slope, terrain aspect and hillshade. The different products are made available in both full-European coverage as in a set of 25 tiles covering 1000x1000km each. The EU-DEM map shows a colour shaded relief image over Europe, which has been created by EEA using a hillshade dataset derived from the ETRS89-LAEA version of EU-DEM. As this data cannot be used for analysis purposes (and that there are some known artefacts West of Norway), the downloadable data are single band raster’s with values relating to the actual elevation. The datasets are encoded as GeoTIFF with LZW compression (tiles) or DEFLATE compression (European mosaics as single files). The Web maps include WFS, WMS and WCS services. The EU-DEM statistical validation documents a relatively unbiased (-0.56 meters) overall vertical accuracy of 2.9 meters RMSE, which is fully within the contractual specification of 7m RMSE and the full report can be found at [1].

[1] https://cws-download.eea.europa.eu/in-situ/eudem/Report-EU-DEM-statistical-validation-August2014.pdf

The following text was abstracted from Bruce Gittings' Digital Elevation Data Catalogue: 'http://www.geo.ed.ac.uk/home/ded.html'. The catalogue is a comprehensive source of information on digital elevation data and should be retrieved in its entirety for additional information.

The European 1:1M database now includes the European Union (EU) plus Scandanavia & Eastern Europe. Cost is #355 per small country to #492 for large countries. Prices for the whole of Europe are also available.

Ireland is now part of the Europe 1:1M database, although actually captured at 1:500K and previously named Ireland 1:500K database.

Discounts are normally available for educational establishments. For research and teaching (excluding commercial research) the data can be obtained at very low prices through CHEST at Manchester University Computing Centre (Tel: 061 275 6099). Higher education users in ALL European countries excluding the former Warsaw Pact area (for the time being) may obtain data through CHEST following a new deal.

Here we provide a mosaic of the Copernicus DEM 30m for Europe and the corresponding hillshade derived from the GLO-30 public instance of the Copernicus DEM. The CRS is the same as the original Copernicus DEM CRS: EPSG:4326. Note that GLO-30 Public provides limited coverage at 30 meters because a small subset of tiles covering specific countries are not yet released to the public by the Copernicus Programme. Note that ocean areas do not have tiles, there one can assume height values equal to zero. Data is provided as Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs.

The Copernicus DEM is a Digital Surface Model (DSM) which represents the surface of the Earth including buildings, infrastructure and vegetation. The original GLO-30 provides worldwide coverage at 30 meters (refers to 10 arc seconds). Note that ocean areas do not have tiles, there one can assume height values equal to zero. Data is provided as Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs. Note that the vertical unit for measurement of elevation height is meters.

The Copernicus DEM for Europe at 30 m in COG format has been derived from the Copernicus DEM GLO-30, mirrored on Open Data on AWS, dataset managed by Sinergise (https://registry.opendata.aws/copernicus-dem/).

Processing steps: The original Copernicus GLO-30 DEM contains a relevant percentage of tiles with non-square pixels. We created a mosaic map in https://gdal.org/drivers/raster/vrt.html format and defined within the VRT file the rule to apply cubic resampling while reading the data, i.e. importing them into GRASS GIS for further processing. We chose cubic instead of bilinear resampling since the height-width ratio of non-square pixels is up to 1:5. Hence, artefacts between adjacent tiles in rugged terrain could be minimized: gdalbuildvrt -input_file_list list_geotiffs_MOOD.csv -r cubic -tr 0.000277777777777778 0.000277777777777778 Copernicus_DSM_30m_MOOD.vrt

The pixel values were scaled with 1000 (storing the pixels as integer values) for data volume reduction. In addition, a hillshade raster map was derived from the resampled elevation map (using r.relief, GRASS GIS). Eventually, we exported the elevation and hillshade raster maps in Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) format, along with SLD and QML style files.

This dataset contains the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) for Europe from the Hydrologic Derivatives for Modeling and Analysis (HDMA) database. The data were developed and distributed by processing units. There are 11 processing units for Europe. The distribution files have the number of the processing unit appended to the end of the zip file name (e.g. eu_dem_3_2.zip contains the DEM data for unit 3-2). The HDMA database provides comprehensive and consistent global coverage of raster and vector topographically derived layers, including raster layers of digital elevation model (DEM) data, flow direction, flow accumulation, slope, and compound topographic index (CTI); and vector layers of streams and catchment boundaries. The coverage of the data is global (-180º, 180º, -90º, 90º) with the underlying DEM being a hybrid of three datasets: HydroSHEDS (Hydrological data and maps based on SHuttle Elevation Derivatives at multiple Scales), Global Multi-resolution Terrain Elevation Data 2010 (GMTED2010) and the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). For most of the globe south of 60º North, the raster resolution of the data is 3-arc-seconds, corresponding to the resolution of the SRTM. For the areas North of 60º, the resolution is 7.5-arc-seconds (the smallest resolution of the GMTED2010 dataset) except for Greenland, where the resolution is 30-arc-seconds. The streams and catchments are attributed with Pfafstetter codes, based on a hierarchical numbering system, that carry important topological information.

Basic vector map of Europe, the Isohypses are produced by using Copernicus data and information funded by the European Union - EU-DEM layers.

The bodies of water are based on data from naturalearthdata.com.

The EU-DEM is a Digital Surface Model (DSM) representing the first surface as illuminated by the sensors. EU-DEM covers the EEA39 countries and it has been produced by a consortium led by Indra, Intermap edited the EUDEM and AGI provided the water mask. The EU-DEM is a 3D raster dataset with elevations captured at 1 arc second postings (2.78E-4 degrees) or about every 30 meter. It is a hybrid product based on SRTM and ASTER GDEM data fused by a weighted averaging approach. Ownership of EU-DEM belongs to European Commision, DG Enterprise and Industry.

The projection onto an Inspire compliant grid of 25m resolution and the computation of a Hillshade raster derived from a slope and aspect datasets have been performed by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission.

One of the key issues which has driven discontent within the European Union over the period since the great recession and the Eurozone crisis has been dissatisfaction with how democracy works. Citizens of many European countries have expressed that they feel they have no real input into political processes, that political parties tend to represent elite interests rather than their own, and that decision are often made by technocrats rather than through democratic deliberation. Democracy in the EU The topic of democracy in the EU is complicated, as the process of European integration means that member states have pooled their sovereignty together, allowing certain areas of policy to be under the jurisdiction of central EU institutions, such as monetary policy with the ECB and competition policy with the European Commission. This has led to claims by some that there is a 'democratic deficit' in the EU, as citizens are not directly involved in decision making, although the elected heads of member states are often considered the most powerful actors within the union. Since the *****, many countries have experienced waves of support for populist parties, both left and right wing, who have sought to capitalize on this discontent. East-West divides Feelings of discontent with democracy vary widely between countries and regions. Ireland, Luxembourg and the Nordic member states all show low levels of dissatisfaction with democracy, with dissatisfaction with democracy at the EU level being higher than with democracy at home. In fact, this is a trend which can be seen in many member states which joined the EU before 1995, where, on average, over a third of respondents dissatisfied with EU democracy, while dissatisfaction with domestic political procedures is less strong. This trend is drastically reversed in member states who have joined the union since 2004, notably in post-communist countries such as Lithuania or Latvia, where the gap between dissatisfaction with democracy at home and in the EU is close to 20. These countries transitioned from autocratic rule under the communist parties of their countries to democracy less than fifteen years before joining the EU, and many are still experiencing issues with corruption and the rule of law today. Discontent in these countries is more aimed at their own domestic systems rather than the EU, with half of respondents not being satisfied with their domestic democracy. An exception to this is Greece, which joined the EU in 1981, and has, together with Croatia, the highest dissatisfaction with their domestic political system out of all countries, at ** percent of respondents.

The Copernicus DEM is a Digital Surface Model (DSM) which represents the surface of the Earth including buildings, infrastructure and vegetation. We provide two instances of Copernicus DEM named GLO-30 Public and GLO-90. GLO-90 provides worldwide coverage at 90 meters. GLO-30 Public provides limited worldwide coverage at 30 meters because a small subset of tiles covering specific countries are not yet released to the public by the Copernicus Programme. Note that in both cases ocean areas do not have tiles, there one can assume height values equal to zero. Data is provided as Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs. Two releases (i.e. 2019 and 2020) are currently available for all Copernicus DEM instances with the exception of COP-DEM_GLO-30-DTED_PUBLIC and COP-DEM_GLO-30-DGED_PUBLIC, only available as 2019 release. A full collection of tiles per each release can be found via FTP and PANDA Catalogue under dataset names marked with “2019_1” and “2020_1”. The 2020 release has undergone the following improvements with respect to the 2019 release: - infilling with high resolution DEM over Norway; - addition of 5 geocells containing missing small islands; - editing of source raw data; - correction of minor data/auxiliary files inconsistencies; - correction of implausible values. The products impacted by improvements can be identified via a dedicated list: https://spacedata.copernicus.eu/documents/20126/0/COP-DEM_delivery_sheet_v0.7_PUBLIC+%282%29.xlsx/771ce82f-0084-849d-8a34-702c421eacf2?t=1611651454540

The Copernicus DEM is a Digital Surface Model (DSM) that represents the surface of the Earth including buildings, infrastructure and vegetation. The Copernicus DEM is provided in 3 different instances: EEA-10, GLO-30 and GLO-90. Data were acquired through the TanDEM-X mission between 2011 and 2015. The datasets were made available for use in 2019 and will be maintained until 2026.

European Commission - Service for Foreign Policy Instruments - Activity File - Lao (People's Democratic Republic)

European Commission - Service for Foreign Policy Instruments - Activity File - Democratic Republic of the Congo

European Commission - Directorate-General for International Partnerships - Activity File - Democratic People's Republic of Korea

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).