Lidar derived updates to Living Atlas World Elevation Layers (December 2024)

ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World provides foundation elevation layers and tools to support analysis and visualization across the ArcGIS system. These layers get updated quarterly with high resolution elevation data from federal agencies, open sources, and community maps program. Esri is providing these datasets as ready to use services that benefit the GIS community and extend the use of data in new and innovative ways. In this release, world elevation layers are updated with many lidar derived high-resolution Digital Terrain Models (DTM’s).

Terrain and TopoBathy layers are updated with:

• Natural Resources Canada’s (NRCan) lidar derived High-Resolution Digital Elevation Model (HRDEM) of 1 meter. In this release over 750,000 km² new data has been added, which brings total coverage of HRDEM to nearly 1,230,000 km² spanning across ten provinces (see map below).

• Natural Resources Canada’s (NRCan) lidar derived High-Resolution Digital Elevation Model (HRDEM) of 2 meters covering about 51,000 km² in southern part of the country.
• Bundesamt für Eich- und Vermessungswesen’s (BEV) 10 meter lidar derived DTM’s covering the entire country of Austria.
• USGS’s 1/3 arc second (~ 10 meters) seamless DEM dataset for the United States with full coverage of the 48 conterminous states, Hawaii, Alaska, and U.S. territories.
• USGS’s 1 arc second (~30 meters) seamless DEM dataset for the conterminous United States, Alaska, Hawaii, Canada, and Mexico.

Ready-To-Use Elevation Tools:

Ready-To-Use Elevation Tools (Profile, Viewshed and Summarize Elevation) are also updated with the Austria 10 meters, USGS’s 1/3 and 1 arc second datasets.

Let’s see a few examples highlighting the improvements.

These data updates will be rolled out to the world elevation tiled services – Elevation 3D (Terrain3D and TopoBathy3D) and Hillshade (World Hillshade and World Hillshade (Dark) ) tentatively by the end of next quarter.

To see the coverage extents of each source comprising World Elevation services, check out the Elevation Coverage Map.

You can help in improving these services by contributing high-resolution elevation data to Living Atlas of the World. To participate and learn more, check out the Esri Community Maps for Elevation program.