Canadian Digital Elevation Data

A weblog for members of the Canadian Cartographic Association and other individuals interested in all things cartographic

Canadian Digital Elevation Data

Published Friday, July 07, 2006 by CCAer | E-mail this post

I have no idea how long this has been there but Geobase has a somewhat complete set of digital elevation files for the country at scales of 1:50,000 and 1:250,000. The files are split into east and west portions for each tile and are in USGS DEM format. The 1:250,000 set is complete for the entire country (all 9,976,140 square kilometres of it) while the 1:50,000 set covers about 2/3 of it and about all of its populated areas (some of which is still in production - as indicated by the orange squares on the map to the right). Both can be browsed by drilling down through a map or by using the wms that Geobase has put up. Registration is required to download the files but it is free. Technical specifications on the data are available from the site in pdf format.

For a while access to base data has been more accessible in the United states than in Canada but with datasets like this that is changing. Though some essential large scale datasets are still publicly unavailable (e.g. drainage), the ease of accessing data on the Geobase is much easier than on the USGS site. Sometimes the simplest thing works the best.

Also available on the site is the national road network and orthorectified Landsat images for the country.

9 Responses to “Canadian Digital Elevation Data”

Anonymous on 11:07 PM

Hi. I'm glad that I found your blog. I'm really interested with cartography and your posts/articles are really enlightnening. I'm from the Philippines and there isn't anyone here that shares my interest. I hope hope to learn from you and this site.

Gabby
gabfph@yahoo.com
Anonymous on 5:21 AM

visited ur blog for d first time. saw it as a noted blog on blogger, must say luvly one
brilliant
Anonymous on 5:23 AM

nice blog, must say brilliant. saw it as a noted blog n visited, hope u dont mind.
keep up d gud work
bye
Anonymous on 3:39 PM

i saw it as a noted blog too.
why not set up something like the geograph project for canada :)
Anonymous on 6:55 PM

Nice blog
Anonymous on 5:11 AM

I love your website. I don't think I've seen another weblog with this kind of passion for maps. It's funny that you mentioned the usability-challenged software the USGS makes -- it seems like most of their public software is like that. I don't think there's much of an internal solution for it, but I'm glad that you're pointing out better mapping solutions that are out there. I'm glad there are people out there that are making maps interesting.
Anonymous on 8:54 AM

Mi piace molto il tuo blog. Un saluto da Mauro. (ITALIA)
Anonymous on 11:57 AM

The CDED1 have been on geobase for some time now. One thing imoprtant to keep in mind is the accuracy and reliability. Make sure you read the documentation. Example: we found out in our data that neighbooring 1:50k sheets sometimes do not match properly for their height values.
Anonymous on 4:18 AM

Visited oyur blog for the first time.Excellent.