Downloading USGS US DEMs

29 March 2021

USGS hosts a number of elevation datasets covering parts of the US, as part of the 3D Elevation Program.

In the past I’ve written scrapers to download the data, but the tiles are available in S3 so can be easily downloaded with commandline tools.

10m

The 10m CONUS dataset can be downloaded with

aws s3 sync s3://prd-tnm/StagedProducts/Elevation/13/TIFF  ./ned-10m --no-sign-request

or to just keep the tiles and skip any metadata:

aws s3 sync s3://prd-tnm/StagedProducts/Elevation/13/TIFF  ./ned-10m --no-sign-request --include "*.tif"

Each tile covers a 1° square. The tiles are kept in folders like

n06e163/USGS_13_n06e163.tif

Most folders only have a single tile, but some folders have multiple files where the data has been updated. In this case, any updated tiles will have the update date as part of the filename:

n28w100/USGS_13_n28w100.tif
n28w100/USGS_13_n28w100_20201228.tif

3m

The 3m dataset can be downloaded with

aws s3 sync s3://prd-tnm/StagedProducts/Elevation/19/IMG  ./ned-10m --no-sign-request

or to just keep the tiles and skip any metadata:

aws s3 sync s3://prd-tnm/StagedProducts/Elevation/19/IMG  ./ned-10m --no-sign-request --include "*.zip"

The dataset is made up of 0.25° square tiles, compressed into zip archives with the tile location in the filename

ned19_n13x25_e144x50_gu_guam_2012.zip

There are a few squares that are covered by multiple tiles: usually this the actual elevation data doesn’t overlap so the tiles should be merged.

1m

The 1m dataset is laid out similarly to the 3m dataset, with the S3 path s3://prd-tnm/StagedProducts/Elevation/1m/IMG. The dataset is very large though and is still increasing, so check you have enough space before downloading the whole thing.