FathomDEM v1-0 Eurasia and Africa
Creators
Description
FathomDEM Digital Elevation model for locations east of 30W (including Europe, Africa, Asia and part of Oceania).
FathomDEM is a global 30m DEM produced using a novel application of a hybrid vision transformer model. This model removes surface artifacts from a global radar DEM, Copernicus DEM, aligning it more closely with true topography.
This dataset is documented in the peer reviewed article FathomDEM: an improved global terrain map using a hybrid vision
transformer model
FathomDEM data for locations west of 30W is available in the dataset FathomDEM v1-0 Americas
Abstract
The Earth’s terrain is linked to many physical processes, and gaining the most accurate representation is key to work in many sectors from engineering to natural hazards modeling and ecology. Existing global digital elevation models (DEMs) are widely used, however often suffer from systematic biases caused by trees, buildings and instrumentation error, ultimately limiting their effectiveness. We present here, FathomDEM, a new global 30 m DEM produced using a novel application of a hybrid vision transformer model. This model removes surface artifacts from a global radar DEM, Copernicus DEM, aligning it more closely with true topography. In addition to improving on other global DEMs, FathomDEM also has reduced error compared to coastal-focussed DEMs such as the recent DeltaDTM. This demonstrates its impressive capacity to perform for specific landscapes, while being trained globally to model a wide range of terrain types.
FathomDEM has been tested on the downstream task of flood modeling, showing increased accuracy compared to those run with the previous best global DEM, FABDEM, approaching the performance of LiDAR based flood modeling. This improvement is attributed to FathomDEM’s smaller error and substantial reduction in artifacts. This shows the suitability of FathomDEM for applied tasks and strengthens our evaluation compared to one based on vertical error alone.
Technical info
The dataset consists of 1x1 degree tiles provided in the format of GeoTiff files. Filenames refer to coordinates in WGS84 of the southwest corner of the tile.
Data is packaged into 30x30 degree zip archives with southwest and northest corners specified in the filename.
Additional metadata is as follows:
| Attribute | Value |
| Horizontal Reference System | WGS84 (EPSG 4326) |
| Vertical datum | EGM08 (EPSG 3855) |
| Latitudes covered | S60 and above |
| AREA OR POINT | Point |
| Data filename (example) | n45e002.tif |
| Units of Elevation | cm |
| Licence | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 |
Files
Restricted
The record is publicly accessible, but files are restricted to users with access.
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FathomDEM is available under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. This allows non commercial use and requires that any derivatives of FathomDEM are also published under the same license.
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Additional details
Related works
- Continues
- Dataset: 10.5281/zenodo.14523356 (DOI)
- Is documented by
- Journal article: 10.1088/1748-9326/ada972 (DOI)