EU DEM 25m upper Garda Lake area with Riva del Garda and Arco (Italy). 3D view in wxNVIZ – GRASS GIS 7

The 25m European Digital Elevation Model (EU-DEM, Version 1) is a Digital Surface Model (DSM) representing the first surface as illuminated by the sensors:

EU DEM Rotaliana with Mezzocorona and S. Michele (Italy). Produced using Copernicus data and information funded by the European Union – EU-DEM layers.

Its elevations were captured at 1 arc second postings (2.78E-4 degrees). The tiles are provided at 25m resolution in EU-LAEA (EPSG. 3035) projection, temporal coverage: 2000, published in Oct 2013. It is a realisation of the Copernicus programme, managed by the European Commission, DG Enterprise and Industry. Metadata are provided here. According to their “Methodology” page it is a hybrid product based on SRTM and ASTER GDEM data fused by a weighted averaging approach and it has been generated as a contiguous dataset divided into 1 degree by 1 degree tiles, corresponding to the SRTM naming convention. In addition to the DEM data, a colour shaded relief image over Europe is provided.

From the metadata page: “The EU-DEM data are provided as is, i.e. without a formal validation yet. An independent statistical validation is scheduled as part of the GIO land monitoring service activities, and will be made available in the course of 2014.”

1. Data download

Note that the GeoTIFF files are of major size, up to 5 GB:

• Download GeoTIFF tiles by file name
• Download GeoTIFF tiles by map based selection

2. Data import

The data come as ZIP compressed files, hence unzipping occurs (or simply use the fancy “vsizip” driver in GDAL).

Hint for GRASS GIS users: instead of importing the data, you can use the r.external command to register the GeoTIFF DEM file instead of imorting it within a EU LAEA projected location.

Enjoy!