EU-DEM
The digital elevation model over Europe (EU-DEM) that came out of the global monitoring for environments and security (GMES) geospatial reference data access (RDA) project is a digital surface model (DSM) representing the first surface that is captured by the sensors. EU-DEM was produced by a consortium led by Indra. It covers the 39 member countries of the European environment agency and other cooperating countries.
EU-DEM was edited by Intermap, while Aerogeodezijos Institutas (AGI) provided the water mask.
The dataset for EU-DEM was produced by the Copernicus programme, which is managed by the European Commission's Directorate-General for Enterprise and Industry.
EU-DEM is a 3D raster dataset with elevations captured at 1 arc per second postings (2.78E-4 degrees), or about every 30 metres. It is a hybrid product based on the shuttle radar topography mission (SRTM) and advanced spaceborne thermal emission and reflection radiometer (ASTER) global digital elevation model (GDEM) data that are fused by a weighted averaging approach.
EU-DEM was generated as a contiguous dataset divided into 1-degree by 1-degree tiles corresponding to the SRTM naming convention.
The spatial reference system is geographic, latitude/longitude with horizontal datum ETRS89, ellipsoid GRS80 and vertical datum EVRS2000 with geoid EGG08 (European petroleum survey group [EPSG] code: 4258).
The vertical unit of this DSM is metres.
The tiles were then aggregated into 5-degree by 5-degree tiles, which were projected to ETRS-Lambert azimuthal equal-area projection (LAEA) by the Commission's Joint Research Centre (EPSG code: 3035).
Several other products were also generated:
- a colour-shaded relief image of Europe was created by the European Environment Agency using a hillshade dataset derived from the ETRS89-LAEA (EPSG code: 3035) version of EU-DEM. This dataset cannot be used for analytical purposes;
- a hydrography layer (streams, confluence points and watersheds);
- a root mean square error (RMSE) (denoting the error derived from the quality assessment procedure).
All datasets of Version 1 are available as tiles (5-degree by 5-degree or 1 000 x 1 000 km) and as single files. The datasets are encoded as:
- GeoTIFF with LZW compression (tiles) or DEFLATE compression (European mosaics as single files) for the raster files
- GDB for the vector data sets
The EU-DEM statistical validation documents a relatively unbiased (-0.56 metres) overall vertical accuracy of 2.9 metres RMSE, which is fully within the contractual specification of 7 metres RMSE. Access the full report.
Copyright notice
Please refer to the European Environmental Agency (EEA) website for any specific download rules that might apply to this dataset.