ETOPO 2022

User Guide

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1. Intent of this Document and POC
1.1 This document is intended to provide a basic understanding of the product (or dataset)
including points of contact, sources used to develop the product, quality control practices, and
steps taken to validate the accuracy of the product. References are provided at the end of this
document for users interested in further technical details.

1.2 Technical point of contact for this dataset:

Michael MacFerrin ([email protected]) (primary developer)
Matthew Love ([email protected]) (co-developer)
Christopher Amante ([email protected]) (project manager)

2. Product Overview and Intended Uses

2.1 ETOPO 2022 Overview
ETOPO 2022 is a release of NOAA’s “Earth TOPOgraphy” dataset. It is a full-coverage, seamless,
gridded topographic and bathymetric bare-earth elevation dataset. Primary end-users of ETOPO
are coastal hazard and tsunami modelers; however, ETOPO is used as a baseline dataset in
thousands of scientific papers, data products, and references worldwide. ETOPO 2022 is an
updated, higher-resolution version of previously released ETOPO5 (5 arc-minute), ETOPO2 (2’),
and ETOPO1 (1’) global grids. For further use in this document, “ETOPO” refers to the ETOPO
2022 release.

ETOPO is released globally as a full-global-coverage earth surface elevation file comprised of 288
individual 15x15 degree tiles (latitude/longitude) at 15-arc-second geographic resolution. The tiles
are provided in GeoTiff and Network Common Data Form (NetCDF) formats, with identical
information provided in each format. An additional 62 tiles have “bed” versions that provide
bedrock elevations under the surface of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Each 15s tile has
a Source ID (SID) integer file identifying from which data source each ETOPO grid cell was
acquired. All tiles are in horizontal WGS84 geographic coordinates (EPSG 1:4326) and referenced
in meters relative to the Earth Gravitational Model of 2008 (EGM2008) geoid surface
(EPSG:3855). Each tile comes with an accompanying integer Source ID (“sid”) tile specifying
from which source dataset each ETOPO elevation was derived (see Section 5). Data Sources and
Processing), as well as an accompanying “geoid” tile for converting EGM2008 geoid heights into
WGS84 ellipsoid elevation heights (EPSG:4979). Since most other geoid, ellipsoid, and/or tidal
vertical datums are defined by grids in reference to the WGS84 ellipsoid, this eases the conversion
of ETOPO 2022 tiles into other vertical reference datums of the user’s choice. For most purposes,
EGM2008 is an adequate approximation of mean sea level.

1
EPSG = European Petroleum Survey Group, commonly-used codes for horizontal and vertical coordinate reference
systems. References available at https://epsg.io/.

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2.2 Elevation Conversion
To convert a given tile from EGM2008 to WGS84-referenced elevations, add the values of the
elevation tile to the geoid-height tile:

ETOPO Elevation (EGM2008) + GEOID = WGS84 Elevation

Single global tiles are provided at 30- and 60-arc-second (i.e., 1-arc-minute) resolutions in both
GeoTiff and NetCDF format, in surface and ice-sheet-bed versions. 30- and 60-second grids were
downsampled from the 15-arc-second elevation tiles for more general uses, and do not have
accompanying SID tiles.

2.3 Naming Convention

ETOPO 2022 tiles are named in the following manner:

ETOPO_2022_v[#]_[RR]s_[N][YY][W][XXX][_suffix][.tif]

with the following information in place of the brackets []:

[#] - Version number of the release. In this case, version 1.
[RR] - Data tile resolution (1, 15, 30, 60), in arc-seconds
[N] - “N” or “S”, for Northern or Southern hemisphere
[YY] - 2-digit latitude of tile’s northern (top) border
[W] - “W” or “E”, for Eastern or Western hemisphere
[XXX] - 3-digit longitude of the tile’s western (left) border
[_suffix] - “_surface”: surface elevations; “_bed”: bed elevations, “_sid”: source id numbers,
“_geoid”: geoid heights.
[.tif] - File extension: .tif (GeoTiff) or .nc (NetCDF) formats.

For example, a tile named

ETOPO_2022_v1_15s_N60W045_bed.tif

is a 15-arc-second resolution GeoTiff file with a North-West (upper-left) corner at North 60-
degrees latitude and West 45-degrees longitude, in this case containing bedrock elevations under
the surface of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets (with ground surface elevations elsewhere
in the tile).

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All ETOPO tiles have a nodata value of -99,999, although this value is not in any ETOPO grids.

3. Data Field Description

Data Field Description

Variable names and units in product - Elevation

- Source ID

Spatial resolution 15 arc-seconds longitude & latitude (WGS84

coordinates)

Temporal resolution and extent Data collected from various sources (see Data
Sources and Processing)

Coverage Global (-180 to 180 longitude, -90 to 90

latitude)

4. Dataset Usage and Citation

ETOPO tiles are freely available to use for all private, academic, or commercial purposes. Data is
available for download on the NOAA ETOPO landing page.
To reference the ETOPO 2022 document, please cite the following:
NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. 2022: ETOPO 2022 15 Arc-Second
Global Relief Model. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information.
https://doi.org/10.25921/fd45-gt74 . Accessed [date].
ETOPO 2022 metadata may be accessed here: ETOPO 2022 metadata landing page

5. Data Sources and Processing

ETOPO Source datasets. Each of these datasets contributed elevation data used in the ETOPO
product. (Other data sources were assessed and evaluated but were not included in the final ETOPO
data product.)

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 Source Vertical Layer source Creator Link 2 Primary Use
Name datum id

GEBCO 3 MSL 4 1 GEBCO GEBCO 2022 Sea

2022 Compilation bathymetry
Group (2022) base layer,
large lake
bathy

GEBCO 2022 MSL 2 GEBCO GEBCO 2022 Sea

sub-ice Compilation bathymetry
Group (2022) (sub-ice,
polar regions)

NOAA 5 various 3 NOAA / NOAA Sea

Estuarine NCEI 6 Estuarine bathymetry
DEMs (archived) DEMs

NOAA various 4 NOAA / NOAA Sea

Regional NCEI Regional bathymetry
DEMs (archived) DEMs
Catalog

GMRT 7 v4.0 MSL 5 GMRT.org, GMRT Image Sea

Lamont- Server bathymetry
Doherty
Earth
Observatory

BlueTopo NAVD88 8 6 NOAA OCS 9 NOAA OCS Sea

AWS 10 bathymetry

BOEM 11 MSL 7 BOEM BOEM GoM Gulf of

Gulf of Deepwater Mexico
Mexico Bathymetry bathymetry
Bathymetry

2
Website links are active at the time of creation of this document.
3
GEBCO = General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans
4
Mean sea level
5
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
6
National Centers for Environmental Information
7
Global Multi-Resolution Topography
8
North American Vertical Datum of 1988
9
Office of the Coast Survey
10
Amazon Web Services
11
Bureau of Ocean Energy Management

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 Source Vertical Layer source Creator Link 2 Primary Use
Name datum id

ShallowBathy EGM2008 8 Oregon State ShallowBathy Sea

Everywhere University Everywhere bathymetry
(select areas)

Copernicus EGM2008 9 European Copernicus Land

DEM 30m Space DEM 30m topography
Agency

FABDEM 12 EGM2008 10 European FABDEM Land

Space Release Page topography
Agency and
Bristol
University

BedMachine EIGEN-6C4 13 11 NASA 14 NSIDC 15 Ice sheet bed

geoid BedMachine topography
Antarctica v2
and
Greenland v4

GEBCO Lake MSL 12 GEBCO GEBCO 2022 Global

Depths Hydrolakes surveyed lake
outlines and depths (very
GEBCO large lakes)
elevations

CUDEM 16 various 13 NOAA / CUDEM 1/3- Land

NCEI Coastal arc-sec and topography
DEM Team 1/9-arc sec and sea
catalogs 17 bathymetry
(US &
territories)

Other datasets were not directly included in ETOPO, but were instrumental for the development,
production, and/or validation of the source data layers.

12
Forest and Buildings Removed Copernicus DEM
13
EIGEN-6G4 GOCE-derived gravity model
14
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
15
National Snow & Ice Data Center
16
Continuously-Updated Digital Elevation Models
17
Current released data tiles through August 2022

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 Source Name Vertical datum Creator Link Primary Use

ICESat-2 18 EGM2008 / NASA NSIDC ATL03 Photon elevation

WGS84 19 v5, ATL08 v5 data for land
DEM evaluation

HydroLakes n/a HydroSHEDS HydroLakes Global vector

release page outlines of
inland water
bodies

OpenStreetMap n/a OpenStreetMap OpenStreetMap Building outlines

web services (masked during
ICESat-2
validation)

6. Quality Control
All source datasets are visually inspected for artifacts and obvious errors before being included in
the ETOPO product. Ocean bathymetry data products are assessed based upon source resolution,
quality, and age, and are ranked subjectively according to those metrics. (Since data sources such
as GEBCO use a compilation of available ocean-depth soundings, it is often difficult to
independently and quantitatively assess the accuracy of various bathymetric data sources).

Land surface datasets were ranked according to accuracy assessments as validated by NASA’s
ICESat-2 satellite, specifically ICESat-2 data collected during the calendar-year 2021 (1 January
through 31 December). Datasets were assessed individually in their own native horizontal
projections, and again in the final ETOPO product after horizontal regridding and vertical datum
transformations. Details of ICESat-2 processing are outlined in the next section.

7. Validation
Land areas between 89S and 89N latitudes are evaluated for vertical accuracy using a database of
800-billion ICESat-2 ATL03 photons collected during the calendar year 2021. The ATL03
photon product is combined with adjoining ATL08 land-and-vegetation elevation granules to
classify photons that are reflected off land or vegetation canopy. A land mask is produced using
the Copernicus DEM dataset to filter out only solid-land areas, and the HydroLakes dataset is
used to filter out photons reflecting off inland lakes and reservoirs (whose surface heights
fluctuate frequently and are not reliable targets for validating land elevations). Since ETOPO
2022 is a bare-earth elevation dataset, photos that reflected off vegetation canopy (as classified in
the ATL08 dataset) or building-tops (using the OpenStreetMap public web database) are filtered
out. Remaining ground-reflecting photons are collected into each ETOPO grid cell where they
fall. A mean of the interdecile range (10-90th percentile) of these photon elevations is used to

18
Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2
19
World Geodetic Survey of 1984

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produce an ICESat-2 derived ground elevation, which is subtracted from the ETOPO grid cell
elevation to produce an error. Errors are compiled and assessed for each input layer (see Figure
below for CUDEM topography assessments) and displayed (see Figure 1 below) as (A) a
histogram, (B) 1:1 scatterplot with ICESat-2 elevations, (C) histogram of photon density per grid
cell in the interdecile range, and (D) a histogram of average canopy cover over each grid cell.

The final vertical accuracy assessments for ETOPO 2022 are still being compiled with respect to
ICESat-2 and will be made available in a revised version of this document.

8. References

Amante, C. and Eakins, B. A. (2009). ETOPO1 1 Arc-minute Global Relief Model: Procedures,
Data Sources and Analysis,
https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/global/relief/ETOPO1/docs/ETOPO1.pdf

Mayer, L., Jakobsson, M., Allen, G., Dorschel, B., Falconer, R., Ferrini, V., Lamarche, G., Snaith,
H., & Weatherall, P. (2018). The Nippon Foundation—GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project: The
Quest to See the World’s Oceans Completely Mapped by 2030. Geosciences, 8(2), 63.
https://doi.org/10.3390/geosciences8020063

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Ryan, W. B. F., Carbotte, S. M., Coplan, J. O., O’Hara, S., Melkonian, A., Arko, R., Weissel, R.
A., Ferrini, V., Goodwillie, A., Nitsche, F., Bonczkowski, J., & Zemsky, R. (2009). Global Multi-
Resolution Topography synthesis. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, 10(3).
https://doi.org/10.1029/2008GC002332

NOAA BlueTopo: https://nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/data/bluetopo.html

Kramer, K., & Shedd, W. W. (2017). A 1.4-Billion Pixel Map of the Seafloor: BOEM’s
Mission to Visualize Dynamic Geology and Identify Natural Seep Sites in the Gulf of
Mexico. 2017, OS31C-1411.
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017AGUFMOS31C1411K/abstract

Shallow Bathymetry Everywhere: https://shallowbathymetryeverywhere.com/

The European Space Agency. Copernicus DEM - Global and European Digital Elevation
Model (COP-DEM). https://spacedata.copernicus.eu/web/cscda/dataset-
details?articleId=394198

Hawker, L., Uhe, P., Paulo, L., Sosa, J., Savage, J., Sampson, C., & Neal, J. (2022). A 30 m global
map of elevation with forests and buildings removed. Environmental Research Letters, 17(2),
024016. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac4d4f

Morlighem, M., Williams, C. N., Rignot, E., An, L., Arndt, J. E., Bamber, J. L., Catania, G.,
Chauché, N., Dowdeswell, J. A., Dorschel, B., Fenty, I., Hogan, K., Howat, I., Hubbard, A.,
Jakobsson, M., Jordan, T. M., Kjeldsen, K. K., Millan, R., Mayer, L., … Zinglersen, K. B. (2017).
BedMachine v3: Complete Bed Topography and Ocean Bathymetry Mapping of Greenland
From Multibeam Echo Sounding Combined With Mass Conservation. Geophysical Research
Letters, 44(21), 11,051-11,061. https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL074954

HydroLAKES - HydroSHEDS: https://www.hydrosheds.org/products/hydrolakes

OpenStreetMap: https://www.openstreetmap.org/

9. Dataset and Document Revision History

Rev 1.2 – 13 October 2022 - Citation information added.

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