Global Land Water Mask

This is a global land water mask dataset stored in a GeoTIFF file. Water surface types are stored as value 0, whereas land surface types are stored as value 100.

The land water mask has been generated using the Global Self-consistent Hierarchical High-resolution Geography (GSHHG, Version 2.3.7) dataset. To construct the land water mask the intermediate (i) resolution has been used and the following shoreline categories have been considered and used for the land/water classification :

• L1: boundary between land and ocean, except Antarctica (continents) -> land
• L2: boundary between lake and land (lakes) -> water
• L3: boundary between island-in-lake and lake (islands in lakes) -> land
• L6: boundary between Antarctica grounding-line and ocean (Antarctica) -> land

Hence ponds on islands (L4) are ignored and consequently classified as land and Antarctic sea ice (L5) is classified as water. Furthermore, the shapefiles for rivers have not been used, meaning that rivers are not resolved in this dataset and thus classified as land.

The land water mask dataset has been stored in a GeoTIFF file with global coverage (-90 to 90 degrees North and -180 to 180 degrees East) and a geographic coordinate system referenced to the WGS84 datum (proj4 string: '+proj=longlat +datum=WGS84 +no_defs +type=crs'). The GeoTIFF image has the shape 6750 x 13500 pixels meaning that the dataset has a resolution of 0.0267 degrees or approx. 3 km (at the equator).