The Earth’s terrain is linked to many physical processes, and gaining the most accurate representation is key to work in many sectors from engineering to natural hazards modeling and ecology. Existing global digital elevation models (DEMs) are widely used, however often suffer from systematic biases caused by trees, buildings and instrumentation error, ultimately limiting their effectiveness. We present here, FathomDEM, a new global 30 m DEM produced using a novel application of a hybrid vision transformer model. This model removes surface artifacts from a global radar DEM, Copernicus DEM, aligning it more closely with true topography. In addition to improving on other global DEMs, FathomDEM also has reduced error compared to coastal-focussed DEMs such as the recent DeltaDTM. This demonstrates its impressive capacity to perform for specific landscapes, while being trained globally to model a wide range of terrain types. FathomDEM has been tested on the downstream task of flood modeling, showing increased accuracy compared to those run with the previous best global DEM, FABDEM, approaching the performance of LiDAR based flood modeling. This improvement is attributed to FathomDEM’s smaller error and substantial reduction in artifacts. This shows the suitability of FathomDEM for applied tasks and strengthens our evaluation compared to one based on vertical error alone.

The dataset consists of 1x1 degree tiles provided in the format of GeoTiff files. Filenames refer to coordinates in WGS84 of the southwest corner of the tile. Data is packaged into 30x30 degree zip archives with southwest and northest corners specified in the filename. FathomDEM was produced using Copernicus WorldDEM-30 © DLR e.V. 2010–2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014–2018 provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA; all rights reserved. Additional metadata is as follows: Attribute Value Horizontal Reference System WGS84 (EPSG 4326) Vertical datum EGM08 (EPSG 3855) Latitudes covered S60 and above AREA OR POINT Point Data filename (example) n45e002.tif Units of Elevation cm Licence CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

FathomDEM Digital Elevation model for locations west of 30W (Americas and part of Oceania). FathomDEM is a global 30m DEM produced using a novel application of a hybrid vision transformer model. This model removes surface artifacts from a global radar DEM, Copernicus DEM, aligning it more closely with true topography. This dataset is documented in the peer reviewed article FathomDEM: an improved global terrain map using a hybrid visiontransformer model FathomDEM data for locations east of 30W is available in the dataset FathomDEM v1-0 Eurasia and Africa