Coastal elevation data are essential for a wide variety of applications, such as coastal management, flood modelling, and adaptation planning. Low-lying coastal areas (found below 10 m +Mean Sea Level (MSL)) are at risk of future extreme water levels, subsidence and changing extreme weather patterns. However, current freely available elevation datasets are not sufficiently accurate to model these risks. We present DeltaDTM, a global coastal Digital Terrain Model (DTM) available in the public domain, with a horizontal spatial resolution of 1 arcsecond (∼30 m) and a vertical mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.45 m overall. DeltaDTM corrects CopernicusDEM with spaceborne lidar from the ICESat-2 and GEDI missions. Specifically, we correct the elevation bias in CopernicusDEM, apply filters to remove non-terrain cells, and fill the gaps using interpolation. Notably, our classification approach produces more accurate results than regression methods recently used by others to correct DEMs, that achieve an overall MAE of 0.72 m at best. We conclude that DeltaDTM will be a valuable resource for coastal flood impact modelling and other applications.

No accurate global lowland digital terrain model (DTM) exists to date that allows reliable quantification of coastal lowland flood risk, currently and with sea-level rise. We created the first global coastal lowland DTM that is derived from satellite LiDAR data. The global LiDAR lowland DTM (GLL_DTM_v1) at 0.05-degree resolution (~5 × 5 km) is created from ICESat-2 data collected between 14 October 2018 and 13 May 2020. It is accurate within 0.5 m for 83.4% of land area below 10 m above mean sea level (+MSL), with a root-mean-square error (RMSE) value of 0.54 m, compared to three local area DTMs for three major lowland areas: the Everglades, the Netherlands, and the Mekong Delta. This accuracy is far higher than that of four existing global digital elevation models (GDEMs), which are derived from satellite radar data, namely, SRTM90, MERIT, CoastalDEM, and TanDEM-X, that we find to be accurate within 0.5 m for 21.1%, 12.9%, 18.3%, and 37.9% of land below 10 m +MSL, respectively, with corresponding RMSE values of 2.49 m, 1.88 m, 1.54 m, and 1.59 m. Globally, we find 3.23, 2.12, and 1.05 million km² of land below 10, 5, and 2 m +MSL. The 0.93 million km² of land below 2 m +MSL identified between 60N and 56S is three times the area indicated by SRTM90 that is currently the GDEM most used in flood risk assessments, confirming that studies to date are likely to have underestimated areas at risk of flooding. Moreover, the new dataset reveals extensive forested land areas below 2 m +MSL in Papua and the Amazon Delta that are largely undetected by existing GDEMs. We conclude that the recent availability of satellite LiDAR data presents a major and much-needed step forward for studies and policies requiring accurate elevation models. GLL_DTM_v1 is available in the public domain, and the resolution will be increased in later versions as more satellite LiDAR data become available.

Data on the number of floors is required for several applications, for instance, energy demand estimation, population estimation, and flood response plans. Despite this, open data on the number of floors is very rare, even when a 3D city model is available. In practice, it is most often inferred with a geometric method: elevation data is used to estimate the height of a building, which is divided by an assumed storey height and rounded. However, as we demonstrate in this paper with a large dataset of residential buildings, this method is unreliable: <70% of the buildings have a correct estimate. We demonstrate that other attributes and characteristics of buildings can help us better predict the number of floors. We propose several indicators (e.g. construction year, cadastral attributes, building geometry, and neighbourhood census data), and we present a predictive model that was trained with 172,000 buildings in the Netherlands. Our model achieves an accuracy of 94.5% for residential buildings with five floors or less, which is an improvement of about 25% over the geometric approach. Above five floors, our model has only a slight improvement on the geometric approach (5%). The main culprit is the lack of training data for tall buildings, which is uncommon in the Netherlands.

Coastal lowland areas support much of the world population on only a small part of its terrestrial surface. Yet these areas face rapidly increasing land surface subsidence and flooding, and are most vulnerable to future sea level rise. The accurate and up to date digital terrain models (DTMs) that are required to predict and manage such risks are absent in many of the areas affected, especially in regions where populations are least developed economically and may be least resilient to such changes. Airborne LiDAR is widely seen as the most accurate data type for elevation mapping but can be prohibitively expensive, as are detailed field surveys across a broad geographic scale. We present an economical method that utilizes airborne LiDAR data along parallel flight lines (‘strips’) covering between 10% and 35% of the land depending on terrain characteristics, and manual interpolation. We present results for lowland areas in Central Kalimantan and East Sumatra (Indonesia), for which no accurate DTM currently exists. The study areas are covered with forest, plantations and agricultural land, on mineral soils and peatlands. The method is shown to yield DTM differences within 0.5 m, relative to full coverage LiDAR data, for 87.7–96.4% of the land surface in a range of conditions in 15 validation areas, and within 1.0 m for 99.3% of the area overall. After testing, the method was then applied to the entire eastern coastal zone of Sumatra, yielding a DTM at 100 m spatial resolution covering 7.1 Mha of lowland area from 1.45 Mha of effective LiDAR coverage. The DTM shows that 36.3%, or 2.6 Mha, of this area is below 2 m +MSL and, therefore, at risk of flooding in the near future as sea level rise continues. This DTM product is available for use in flood risk mapping, peatland mapping and other applications.

Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) are a necessity for modelling many large-scale environmental processes. In this study, we investigate the potential of data from two spaceborne lidar altimetry missions, ICESat-2 and GEDI—with respect to their vertical accuracies and planimetric data collection patterns—as sources for rasterisation towards creating global DEMs. We validate the terrain measurements of both missions against airborne lidar datasets over three areas in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and New Zealand and differentiate them using land-cover classes. For our experiments, we use five years of ICESat-2 ATL03 data and four years of GEDI L2A data for a total of 252 million measurements. The datasets are filtered using parameter flags provided by the higher-level products ICESat-2 ATL08 and GEDI L3A. For all areas and land-cover classes combined, ICESat-2 achieves a bias of −0.11 m, an MAE of 0.43 m, and an RMSE of 0.93 m. From our experiments, we find that GEDI is less accurate, with a bias of 0.09 m, an MAE of 0.98 m, and an RMSE of 2.96 m. Measurements in open land-cover classes, such as “Cropland” and “Grassland”, result in the best accuracy for both missions. We also find that the slope of the terrain has a major influence on vertical accuracy, more so for GEDI than ICESat-2 because of its larger horizontal geolocation error. In contrast, we find little effect of either beam power or background solar radiation, nor do we find noticeable seasonal effects on accuracy. Furthermore, we investigate the spatial coverage of ICESat-2 and GEDI by deriving a DEM at different horizontal resolutions and latitudes. GEDI has higher spatial coverage than ICESat-2 at lower latitudes due to its beam pattern and lower inclination angle, and a derived DEM can achieve a resolution of 500 m. ICESat-2 only reaches a DEM resolution of 700 m at the equator, but it increases to almost 200 m at higher latitudes. When combined, a 500 m resolution lidar-based DEM can be achieved globally. Our results indicate that both ICESat-2 and GEDI enable accurate terrain measurements anywhere in the world. Especially in data-poor areas—such as the tropics—this has potential for new applications and insights.

Digital elevation models (DEMs) are a necessity for modelling many large-scale environmental processes. In this study, we investigate the potential of data from two spaceborne lidar altimetry missions, ICESat-2 and GEDI—with respect to their vertical accuracies and planimetric data collection patterns—as sources for rasterisation towards global DEMs. We validate the terrain measurements of both missions against airborne lidar datasets over three areas in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and New Zealand, and differentiate them using landcover classes. For our experiments, we use three and a half years of ICESat-2 ATL03 data and three years of GEDI L2A data, totalling 252 million measurements. The datasets are filtered using parameter flags provided by the higher-level products, respectively ICESat-2 ATL08 and GEDI L3A. For all areas and land cover classes combined, ICESat-2 achieves a bias of −0.11m, a MAE of 0.43m, and a RMSE of 0.93m. From our experiments, we find that GEDI is less accurate with a bias of 0.09m, a MAE of 0.98 m and a RMSE of 2.96 m. Measurements in open land cover classes, such as “Cropland” and “Grassland”, result in the best precision for both missions. We also find that the slope of the terrain is a major influence on vertical accuracy, and more so for GEDI than ICESat-2, because of its larger horizontal geolocation error. Contrastingly, we find little effect of either beam power or background solar radiation, nor do we find noticeable seasonal effects on accuracy. Furthermore, we investigate the spatial coverage of ICESat-2 and GEDI by deriving a DEM at different horizontal resolutions and latitudes. GEDI has higher spatial coverage than ICESat-2 at lower latitudes due to its beam pattern and lower inclination angle, and a derived DEM can achieve a resolution of 500 m. ICESat-2 only reaches a DEM resolution of 700 m at the equator but increases to almost 200 m at higher latitudes. When combined, a 500 m resolution lidar-based DEM can be achieved globally. Our results indicate that both ICESat-2 and GEDI enable accurate terrain measurements anywhere in the world. Especially in data-poor areas—such as the tropics—this has potential for new applications and insights.