Copernicus DEM GLO-30: a global Digital Surface Model at 30 m resolution, distributed by the European Space Agency under the Copernicus Programme.
Source & method: A Digital Surface Model (DSM) — it represents the Earth's surface including buildings, infrastructure, and vegetation (not bare-earth terrain). Derived primarily from radar data acquired by the TanDEM-X mission (2011–2015) and edited to flatten water bodies, enforce coastlines, and remove outliers. This is a global reference elevation layer, not a lidar product.
Resolution: 30 m (1 arc-second) nominal. Tiles are 1°×1° in WGS84; rows are a fixed 3600, while the number of columns decreases toward the poles (latitude-dependent longitudinal sampling), so per-item shape and transform vary by latitude.
Coordinate reference: Geographic WGS84 (EPSG:4326); elevations in meters on the EGM2008 geoid (EPSG:3855).
Hosting: Assets reference the public, anonymously readable COGs in the copernicus-dem-30m AWS Open Data bucket in place — Darly does not re-host or copy the pixels.
Coverage: Global.
Documentation:
Access
The catalog is browsable without a key. Elevation lookups need a free API key, sent as an X-API-Key header; see the quickstart.
curl "https://api.darly.io/collections/glo-esa-copdem-30m/items?limit=5"curl -H "X-API-Key: $DARLY_API_KEY" \
"https://api.darly.io/v1/elevation/point?lat=48.8566&lon=2.3522&collections=glo-esa-copdem-30m"from pystac_client import Client
catalog = Client.open("https://api.darly.io")
search = catalog.search(collections=["glo-esa-copdem-30m"], bbox=[-180, -90, 180, 84], max_items=5)
for item in search.items():
print(item.id, item.assets["dtm"].href if "dtm" in item.assets else item.assets["dsm"].href)Providers
- European Space Agency (Copernicus Programme) — licensor
- Airbus Defence and Space / DLR (TanDEM-X) — producer
- AWS Open Data — host
- Darly — processor
Citation
European Space Agency, Sinergise (2021). Copernicus Global Digital Elevation Model (GLO-30). Distributed by OpenTopography / AWS Open Data.