The ground under any area on Earth, as a GeoTIFF.

What Copernicus DEM is

Copernicus DEM GLO-30 — a 30 m surface model of the whole Earth

Copernicus DEM is a global digital elevation model from Copernicus, the European Union’s Earth observation program, built from TanDEM-X radar flown between 2011 and 2015. It is truly global, including the poles, with the voids filled. The date on every tile is April 22, 2021 — the day this edition of the product was published, not when the ground was measured, which is why the app labels it “Edition” rather than “Acquired”.

• GLO-30 is the default: one height every 30 m, published at 1 arc-second. GLO-90 is the same surface sampled every 90 m — about a tenth the file size, and the right choice when you want a whole country rather than a valley.
• It is a surface model (DSM), not bare earth (DTM). The radar measured the first thing it hit, so buildings, forest canopy, bridges and dam walls are all part of the height. Over a city you are reading rooftops; over a forest you are reading treetops, which can be 20–30 m above the soil.
• Heights are above the EGM2008 geoid, not the ellipsoid — near enough to mean sea level for most work, but not the WGS84 ellipsoidal height a GPS receiver reports by default. The two differ by about −105 m to +85 m around the world, so convert one to match the other before combining this with GNSS heights.
• NASADEM is the comparison layer: reprocessed SRTM, measured in February 2000, covering 56°S to 61°N only. Its value is the date — a snapshot of the world a decade or more earlier — so new islands, new reservoirs, open-pit mines and shrinking lakes show up when you compare the two. NASADEM uses the older EGM96 geoid, which differs from EGM2008 by up to about a meter.
• All three are read live from the Microsoft Planetary Computer as the cop-dem-glo-30, cop-dem-glo-90 and nasadem collections. All Things Spatial does not host a copy.

Watch it work

Watch the walkthrough

A four-minute walkthrough: find and download, the six Terrain renderings, Showcase, Tools, the Help notes on what the data is, and the GeoTIFF opened in ArcGIS Pro.

How it works

Find the tiles that cover you, read the terrain, download your area

Find

1. Pick an area. Search for a place, or draw a rectangle over the part you care about. The rectangle is also what a clip download is cut to.
2. Choose the elevation data. Copernicus GLO-30 (the default), GLO-90 or NASADEM.
3. Search this area. The app lists the 1-degree tiles that reach your area. There is no date filter and no cloud filter: a DEM is one global elevation surface, not a stack of dated pictures, so searching is about coverage only.
4. Download. Just my area is a Float32 GeoTIFF clipped to your rectangle at the source resolution — the one to reach for. Whole tile is the published 1-degree Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF, unchanged: about 37 MB for GLO-30, 4.5 MB for GLO-90 and 10 MB for NASADEM. Every download arrives as a zip holding the GeoTIFF and a README-LICENSE.txt with the attribution the license requires.

Terrain

• Elevation — green for the lowest land in view, through pale yellow, tan and brown, to white for the highest. Each time the map comes to rest the ramp is re-stretched from the 2nd to the 98th percentile of the terrain on screen (or to the area you searched), so Everest and the Dead Sea shore both use the full range of colors. Blue means one thing only: at or below 0 m. Land never turns blue just because it is the lowest ground on screen.
• Hillshade — shaded relief, with azimuth and altitude controls for the sun position.
• Contours — drawn in your browser. Every 5th line is an index contour: thicker, and labeled in meters, or feet when the legend is set to feet. The interval is Auto by default: the smallest of 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, 250 or 500 m that puts no more than about 40 lines down the height of the map — 250 m around Everest, 10 m around a New England lake town.
• Slope and aspect — computed in your browser from elevation one zoom level finer than the map, then averaged back to the map’s pixel size; aspect is also smoothed with a 3×3 median filter before it is colored.
• Water — the “permanent water bodies” class of ESA WorldCover 2021, a 10 m land-cover map, drawn over the elevation colors and under the contour lines. It is for display only and is never part of a download; turn it off with Show water.
• Swipe — vs Basemap keeps your rendering on the left and the satellite basemap alone on the right; vs NASADEM puts Copernicus DEM on the left and NASADEM on the right in the same rendering, so any difference is a change in the ground between 2000 and 2011–2015.

Tools

• Spot elevation — select anywhere on the map to read the elevation there, in meters and feet, with the tile it was read from.
• Elevation profile — draw a line across the terrain and get a profile chart sampled at up to 200 points, with a CSV download.
• Export contours — the contours of your search area as GeoJSON, at the same interval the map is showing, ready to label, style and load into ArcGIS Pro or QGIS. The file holds the exact traced lines, without the light smoothing the map applies.

Showcase

Ten places to start

Every height below was measured at the preset’s own point against the live Copernicus DEM before it shipped. The Showcase tab opens each one in the rendering that makes it readable.

• Grand Canyon, Arizona 740 m, Elevation. The Colorado River at the canyon floor measures 740 m here, with the rims better than 1,300 m above it.
• Mount Everest and the Khumbu 8,719 m, Hillshade. Copernicus samples the snow surface, so the summit sits close to but not exactly on the surveyed 8,849 m height; hillshade makes the Khumbu icefall and the South Col legible.
• Matterhorn, Switzerland and Italy 4,229 m, Slope. Four near-vertical faces; NASADEM reads 3,667 m at the same point, because SRTM’s radar could not see into terrain this steep.
• Vatnajökull ice cap, Iceland 1,500 m, Aspect. A dome of ice that drains outward in every direction; Iceland is north of 61°, so NASADEM does not cover it at all.
• Badwater Basin, Death Valley −85 m, Elevation. The lowest land in North America, in the below-sea-level band.
• Dead Sea shore, Jordan Rift −427 m, Elevation. The lowest land surface on Earth; NASADEM read −417 m at the same point in February 2000.
• Meteor Crater, Arizona 1,562 m, Contours at 10 m. A 1.2 km bowl on a 1,562 m plain that draws as a set of closed rings.
• Mount Fuji, Japan 3,767 m, Contours at 100 m. Close enough to a perfect cone that the contours come out as concentric circles.
• Flevoland polders, Netherlands −2.85 m, Elevation. Land that was the bottom of a sea until it was pumped dry in the 1950s and 60s.
• Palm Jumeirah, Dubai 8.11 m vs 0.00 m, Swipe vs NASADEM. Copernicus, flown 2011–2015, measures 8.11 m of ground; NASADEM, flown February 2000, reads open sea. The island was built in between.

Where the data comes from

Source and license

• Microsoft Planetary Computer Copernicus DEM GLO-30 and GLO-90 — the 1-degree tiles as Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs. They supply the tile list, every map tile and every download.
• Microsoft Planetary Computer NASADEM — the February 2000 comparison layer.
• ESA WorldCover 2021 — the water overlay, for display only.

This attribution is required whenever the data, or anything derived from it, is published or passed on, and it ships inside every download as README-LICENSE.txt:

© DLR e.V. 2010-2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014-2018 provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA; all rights reserved.

Citation DOI: https://doi.org/10.5270/ESA-c5d3d65

NASADEM (NASA/JPL-Caltech); Microsoft Planetary Computer

The water overlay is ESA WorldCover 2021, licensed CC BY 4.0. Contains modified ESA WorldCover 2021 data (c) ESA WorldCover project / Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2021) processed by ESA WorldCover consortium. It is not in README-LICENSE.txt because no download contains it.

All Things Spatial is not affiliated with or endorsed by the European Space Agency, the European Commission, DLR, Airbus, NASA or Microsoft. Confirm currency, accuracy and fitness for purpose with the source programs before relying on any height, contour or slope for operational, regulatory or financial decisions.

FAQ

Common questions

Why isn’t the lake blue by itself?

An elevation model measures height, and nothing else — it cannot tell a lake from a field at the same height. Copernicus DEM does flatten lakes to a single level, and the producers publish a separate water mask alongside it, but the Planetary Computer serves only the elevation band. The blue water you see comes from a different dataset, ESA WorldCover 2021, whose “permanent water bodies” class is drawn over the elevation colors. Turn it off with Show water to see the bare elevation.

Is this the bare ground?

No. Copernicus DEM is a digital surface model (DSM): buildings, forest canopy, bridges and dam walls are all part of the height. A digital terrain model (DTM) is the bare ground with all of that stripped off — what you want for flood modeling, cut-and-fill or drainage — and this is not that product; national lidar programs are where to look. Slope and contours over a built-up area or dense forest describe the canopy, not the land.

Why is the map blank when I zoom out?

The elevation service returns no tiles below zoom 8 — measured, not guessed: it answers “204 No Content” at zoom 7 and below. Rather than fire requests that come back empty, the app stops asking and shows a chip telling you to zoom in. The 90 m product stops at the same zoom.

What does 30 m actually mean?

One pixel covers about 30 m on the ground — roughly a basketball court — and holds a single height for all of it. A ridge, a valley, a highway embankment or a crater rim: yes. An individual building, a ditch, a curb or a footpath: no — they are smaller than the pixel and are averaged into it. A summit reads slightly low for the same reason. The vertical accuracy of the product is about 4 m at 90% confidence.

How do I open the GeoTIFF in ArcGIS Pro or QGIS?

Unzip the download first — most software will not read a raster from inside an archive. The raster is a Float32 GeoTIFF in EPSG:4326 with elevation in meters and no styling. In ArcGIS Pro, use Map → Add Data, set a stretched color scheme, then Appearance → Shade Relief; Spatial Analyst has Slope, Aspect, Hillshade and Contour. In QGIS, drag the .tif onto the canvas; Raster → Analysis and Raster → Extraction → Contour cover the same ground. Because the data is in degrees rather than meters, set a Z factor on slope tools (about 111,320 × cos(latitude) meters per degree), or reproject to a metric system such as UTM first.