Upcoming GPXZ dataset update (v2025.1)

The GPXZ elevation dataset will be upgraded next week!

The API will return data from the new dataset beginning 2025-12-10 23:59 UTC.

Most users need to do nothing: new queries will soon start to return improved data. Some users may want to rebuild processed data or re-fetch cached queries.

The main changes are

  • New areas of hires coverage in Europe.
  • Expanded hires coverage in many areas, including USA, NZ, and Canada.
  • Tree and building removal in our non-lidar global basemap.
  • Vertical datum normalisation.

API changes

Once the new dataset is live, API responses will have the value 2025.1 in the X-DATASET-VERSION header.

The source attribute that’s included in most API responses may contain some new values. These new source ids will be added to the /v1/elevation/sources endpoint.

Coverage changes

The latest dataset adds many new areas of high resolution lidar data, as well as updated data for existing areas of hires coverage.

New hi-res coverage

  • Norway (whole country at a 1m resolution)
  • Estonia (whole country at 1m)
  • Netherlands (whole country at 50cm)
  • Belgium (whole country at 20m, Brussels and Flanders at 1m)
  • Germany (most states at 1m)

Improved hi-res coverage

  • New Zealand (expanded coverage: most of the country including all major population centres are now covered)
  • USA
    • The 10m base coverage for the USA has been updated.
    • Expanded 1m lidar coverage, now covering the majority of the country.
  • Canada (expanded 1m lidar coverage, particularly in Quebec and Ontario).
  • GEBCO (wordwide) and EMOD (Europe) bathymetry have been updated to their latest versions.
  • England (updated to the latest version)
  • France (filled some areas of missing data for full country coverage)

Methodology changes

Global terrain basemap

v2025.1 uses a new gobal basemap for areas without lidar coverage. We used a variety of data sources and satistical methods to reduce the tree and building bias in the 30m Copernicus surface dataset. As a result, the GPXZ elevation dataset is now a global terrain model.

Updated merge algorithm

The source merging algorithm for v2025.1 uses the same philosopy as previous version, but has been rewritten to produce smoother merges and better correct erroneous data.

Notable areas of improvement include

  • Smoother land-bathymetry mergeing.
  • Smoother merging between datasets.
  • Expaned QA process identifying and resolving more errors contained in source DEMs.

Vertical datum normalisation

All elevation values are now given relative to EGM2008 (EPSG:3855).