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 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).

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.

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.

The hydro-flattened bare earth DEM was generated using the 2018 DC lidar bare earth points and 3D hydro breaklines to a resolution of 1 m. The bare earth points that fell within 1NPS along the hydro breaklines were excluded from the DEM generation process and put into class 20 – ignored ground. This is analogous to the removal of mass points for the same reason in a traditional photogrammetrically compiled DTM. This process was done in batch using proprietary software. The technicians then used proprietary software for the production of the lidar-derived hydro-flattened bare earth DEM surface in initial grid format at 1 m GSD. Water bodies (inland ponds and lakes), inland streams and rivers, and island holes were hydro-flattened within the DEM. Once the initial, hydro-flattened bare earth DEM was generated, the tiles were checked to ensure that the grid spacing met specifications. The surface was also checked to ensure proper hydro-flattening.This dataset provided as an ArcGIS Image service. Please note, the download feature for this image service in Open Data DC provides a compressed PNG, JPEG or TIFF. The compressed GeoTIFF raster dataset is available under additional options when viewing downloads.