Copernicus DEM Global 90m

The whole Copernicus DEM GLO-90 in the cloud as a single seamless Zarr store: no tiles to download or stitch together.

A global 3 arc-second grid of 216,000 × 432,000 pixels: identical to the original tiles between 50°S and 50°N, interpolated in longitude only at higher latitudes. Each pixel holds the surface height in metres above the EGM2008 geoid, including buildings, infrastructure and vegetation (DSM).

The data is free and can be opened with Python / Xarray (zarr ≥ 3), like all Earth Data Hub datasets. Unlike most of them, it also works directly with GDAL (3.8 or newer) and its command-line tools. In both cases, first set up your credentials as described in Getting started. With the credentials in ~/.netrc, extracting any region to a GeoTIFF file takes a single GDAL command:

gdal_translate \
    -projwin 12.4 42 12.6 41.8 \
    'ZARR:"/vsicurl/https://data.earthdatahub.destine.eu/copernicus-dem/GLO-90-v1.zarr":/dsm' \
    rome-dsm.tif

Changelog

Version 1 is not fully compatible with version 0: most notably, latitudes now run from north to south. Version 0 remains available to existing users until the end of 2026, so please switch before then using the migration guide.

Attribution

Produced using Copernicus WorldDEM-90 © 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

Users are responsible for complying with the licence terms of each dataset.

How to download the data

This Python snippet includes the token directly in the URL.

1import xarray as xr
2
3xr.open_dataset(
4    "https://edh:<your API key>@data.earthdatahub.destine.eu/copernicus-dem/GLO-90-v1.zarr",
5    chunks={},
6    engine="zarr",
7    decode_coords="all",
8    mask_and_scale=False,
9)

Variables

Short NameUnitsDescription
dsm
m

height of model surface above the EGM2008 geoid

DestinE platform