Copernicus GLO-90 DEM (ESA, 2021) – 250 m Downscaled Continental Mosaics: North America and Europe

These datasets are 250 m resolution continental mosaics derived from the Copernicus Global Digital Elevation Model (GLO-90), Version 1.1, released in March 2021 by the European Space Agency (ESA) and distributed via OpenTopography:portal.opentopography.org/raster?opentopoID=OTSDEM.032021.4326.1

The Copernicus GLO-90 DEM is a global, 90 m (approximately 3 arc-second) digital elevation model produced from TanDEM-X mission data and provided under the Copernicus Data and Information Policy, which allows free and open reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license:creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Each continental mosaic in this archive (North America, Europe) was generated by downloading 6 × 6 degree tiles from the OpenTopography GlobalDEM API (demtype = COP90), removing incomplete or empty tiles (≤ 1 MB), mosaicking aligned rasters using the R package terra v1.8-70, and aggregating (mean) from 90 m to 250 m (approximately 0.0025 degrees) resolution for computational efficiency. Files are single-band GeoTIFFs compressed with LZW and tiled for rapid access.

Spatial reference: WGS 84 / EPSG 4326Elevation units: meters above mean sea level (EGM2008)Resolution: 0.0025 degrees (≈ 250 m)Extent:• North America: 170° W – 50° W, 10° N – 76° N• Europe: 25° W – 40° E, 35° N – 72° N

These mosaics are suitable for continental-scale environmental modeling, terrain analysis, and species-distribution or landscape-ecology applications.

Source dataset citation:European Space Agency (ESA) (2021). Copernicus GLO-90 Digital Elevation Model (Version 1.1) [Dataset]. Distributed by OpenTopography under the Copernicus Data and Information Policy. DOI: doi.org/10.5069/G9028PQB