A Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-resolution Geography Database from 2010-02-19 to 2017-06-15 (NCEI Accession 0304143)

A Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-resolution Geography Database is a high-resolution geography data set amalgamated from three data bases in the public domain:

World Vector Shorelines (WVS).
CIA World Data Bank II (WDBII).
Atlas of the Cryosphere (AC).

The WVS is our basis for shorelines except for Antarctica while the WDBII is the basis for lakes, although there are instances where differences in coastline representations necessitated adding WDBII islands to GSHHG. The WDBII source also provides all political borders and rivers. The addition of AC since 2.3.0 allows us to offer two choices for Antarctica coastlines: Ice-front or Grounding line. These are encoded as levels 5 and 6, respectively and users of GSHHG can choose which set to use. GSHHG data have undergone extensive processing and should be free of internal inconsistencies such as erratic points and crossing segments. The shorelines are constructed entirely from hierarchically arranged closed polygons. A modified version of GSHHG is used by GMT, the Generic Mapping Tools. Starting with version 2.2.2, GSHHG has been released under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

NCEI decommissioned the Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-resolution Geography Database in May 2025 with no further updates. Comments and questions may be sent to: [e-mail].