Global Distribution of Channel Steepness

A variety of topographic metrics are commonly used to understand erosion and uplift of Earth’s surface, channel steepness among the most popular of these. Yet, no globally extensive, consistent calculations of across Earth’s surface exist. We use an integral formulation to provide spatially explicit, globally extensive estimates of steepness across areas of Earth’s surface south of 56°N, and use upsampling to understand biases present in this dataset. Resolution tests show an overestimation of steepness with decreasing elevation-model resolution. We calculated steepness across Earth’s surface using 15” data products, and found that values are largest in narrow bands that consist broadly of the world’s active mountain belts. The data products from this contribution could be mined by a variety of future workers seeking to understand the relationship between and tectonics.