Test and example data for xDEM.
All data copyright is with the associated download locations. This repo holds modified versions of these data, but we do not claim any rights to them.
The first site is Longyearbyen, the world's northernmost settlement and the capital of Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago north of the European continent.
These two rasters (TIFs), from the Terrengmodell Svalbard (S0 Terrengmodell) dataset1, represent two DEMs above mean sea level, generated from stereo models constructed on aerial photos. They cover the west middle part of Svalbard, south of Longyearbyen, at 20 meters resolution with 100% of land cover.
These two vectors (shapefiles), from the Glacier Area Outlines - Svalbard 1936-2010 dataset2, represent the glacier outlines in Svalbard in 1990 and for the 2001-2010 period. The first one was created using cartographic data from the original Norwegian Polar Institute topographic map series as basis by delineating individual glaciers and ice streams, assigning unique identification codes relating to the hydrological watersheds, digitizing center-lines, and providing a number of attributes for each glacier mask. The second one is derived from orthorectified satellite images acquired from the SPOT-5 and ASTER satellite sensors.
This point cloud data comes from NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC) ATLAS/ICESat-2 L3A Land Ice Height dataset (ATL06, Version 7)3, measuring land elevation along 40 m segments of ground track, spaced 20 m apart. The data were acquired by the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS) and retrieved using the SlideRule4 software, over the DEM aera and between 01/01/2019 and 01/01/2021.
The second site is Giza, a pyramid complex located in the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt dating from 2500 BC.
This raster was generated with CARS v0.12.35, an open source 3D tool dedicated to produce Digital Surface Models from stereo satellite images by using photogrammetry. The inputs data are proposed by CARS itself, from a tri-stereo Pleiades from 08/02/2013 (OPEN LICENCE 2.0), which can be downloaded using :
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CNES/cars/master/tutorials/data_gizeh.tar.bz2
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CNES/cars/master/tutorials/data_gizeh.tar.bz2.md5sum
md5sum --status -c data_gizeh.tar.bz2.md5sum
tar xvfj data_gizeh.tar.bz2
The output DSM can be re-generated following the process described in the documentation (CARS v0.12.3). Unlike the previous ones, it has a 3D CRS information and contains NaN values (due to occlusion).
Footnotes
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Norwegian Polar Institute (2014). Terrengmodell Svalbard (S0 Terrengmodell) [Dataset]. Norwegian Polar Institute. https://doi.org/10.21334/NPOLAR.2014.DCE53A47 ↩
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König, M., Kohler, J., & Nuth, C. (2013). Glacier Area Outlines - Svalbard 1936-2010 [Dataset]. Norwegian Polar Institute. https://doi.org/10.21334/NPOLAR.2013.89F430F8 ↩
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Smith, B., Adusumilli, S., Csathó, B. M., Felikson, D., Fricker, H. A., Gardner, A. S., Holschuh, N., Lee, J., Nilsson, J., Paolo, F., Siegfried, M. R., Sutterley, T. & the ICESat-2 Science Team. (2025). ATLAS/ICESat-2 L3A Land Ice Height. (ATL06, Version 7). Boulder, Colorado USA. NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center. https://doi.org/10.5067/ATLAS/ATL06.007. Date Accessed 01-22-2026. ↩
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Shean et al., (2023). SlideRule: Enabling rapid, scalable, open science for the NASA ICESat-2 mission and beyond. Journal of Open Source Software, 8(81), 4982, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.04982 ↩
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D. Youssefi et al., "CARS: A Photogrammetry Pipeline Using Dask Graphs to Construct A Global 3D Model," IGARSS 2020 - 2020 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, Waikoloa, HI, USA, 2020, pp. 453-456, https://doi.org/10.1109/IGARSS39084.2020.9324020 ↩