The data used is maintained by Esri and made available through these requests. A primary benefit of using these data sources is that a lot of the work has already been done, allowing you to perform analysis instead of worrying about compiling, processing, and storing very large datasets of continental and global scales on your local machine or network.
Data coverage
The following map illustrates the types and coverage of ArcGIS elevation data available for analysis:
An interactive map is a also available for exploring the source data further.
Data source details
The ArcGIS elevation data used for the elevation analysis is available at five extents and resolutions. The elevation source data was created in a spherical coordinate system with units of arc seconds. To simplify understanding, it's referred to in the services by its commonly used meters approximation.
- 10 meter (1/3 arc second) resolution elevation raster data are available for the following regions:
- The continental United States, from the USGS National Elevation Dataset
- Norway, Finland, Estonia, Denmark, Austria, Spain, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovak Republic, Italy, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein from various authoritative sources
- 24 meter (0.8 arc second) resolution elevation raster, WorldDEM4Ortho from Airbus Defence and Space GmbH, are available for global land surface excluding the countries of Azerbaijan, DR Congo and Ukraine.
- 30 meter (1 arc second) resolution elevation raster data are available for the following regions:
- United States, Canada, and Mexico, from the USGS National Elevation Dataset
- Africa, South America, most of Europe and continental Asia, the East Indies, New Zealand, and islands of the western Pacific between 60 degrees north and 56 degrees south, from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM)
- Australia, based on the SRTM DEM-S dataset from Geoscience Australia
- 90 meter (3 arc seconds) resolution elevation raster for the land surface of the world between 60 degrees north and 56 degrees south, from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, SRTM.
- 500 meter (15 arc seconds) resolution elevation raster for the world from GEBCO.
- 1000 meter (30 arc seconds) resolution elevation raster for the world from GEBCO.
The requests do not combine data or resolutions. For example, the requests will not create a result that combines 30 meter data in the United States with 90 meter data from Canada. The exception is the Profile request, which uses the GEBCO data for ocean bathymetry regardless of the chosen resolution. These depths should be used only to provide context, not for navigation. For the Viewshed request, oceans have an elevation of zero. For the Summarize Elevation request, oceans and major seas of the world are not considered in the calculation.