• Arctic SDI catalogue
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The GEBCO_2024 Grid - A continuous terrain model of the global oceans and land

The GEBCO grid is global data set of elevation values, in metres, on a 15 arc-second interval grid. It is accompanied by a Type Identifier (TID) Grid that gives information on the types of source data that the GEBCO_2024 Grid is based on.

An additional 4.34 million square kilometres of bathymetric data has been added to the global grid since the last release in 2023, with 26.1% of the seabed now mapped.

This is the Sixth GEBCO grid developed through the Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project.This is a collaborative project between the Nippon Foundation of Japan and GEBCO. The aim of the project is to map the global sea floor by 2030.

GEBCO's grids can be downloaded as a global file in netCDF format or for user-defined areas, through our download app, in netCDF, data GeoTiff and ESRI ASCII raster formats. The data set can also be downloaded in the form of imagery.

This release of the GEBCO grid includes data from version 5.0 of the International Bathymetric Chart of the Arctic Ocean (IBCAO) .

GEBCO's aim is to provide the most authoritative publicly-available bathymetry of the world's oceans. It operates under the joint auspices of the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) (of UNESCO).

Simple

Date ( Publication )
2024-07-30
Date ( Creation )
2024-07-30
Identifier
DTM_GEBCO_2024
Credit
GEBCO
Status
Completed
Point of contact
  Seabed 2030 Global Data Center -
Author
  GEBCO Bathymetric Compilation Group 2022 -
Thèmes Sextant ( Theme )
  • /Physical Environment
GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0 ( Theme )
  • Elevation
Keywords
  • Southern Ocean, Indian Ocean, Arctic Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean, World, elevation, oceans
Mission Atlantic - BODC Parameters ( Theme )
  • /Marine geology/Gravity, magnetics and bathymetry
Mission Atlantic - Data type (DMP) ( Theme )
  • Spatial data products
Mission Atlantic - Work Package ( Theme )
  • WP6 Dynamics of ecosystem state and resources
  • WP4 Benthic Mapping
Ocean Hackathon - Ville ( Place )
  • Boulogne-sur-Mer
  • Brest
  • Cape Town
  • Mexico
  • Nouméa
  • La Rochelle
  • Santiago
  • Toulon
  • Ivory Coast
  • Klaipeda (Lithuania)
  • Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia)
Mission Atlantic - Resources ( Theme )
  • Data
Use limitation
The GEBCO Grid should NOT be used for navigation or for any other purpose involving safety at sea.
Access constraints
Other restrictions
Use constraints
Other restrictions
Other constraints

Terms of use

The GEBCO Grid is placed in the public domain and may be used free of charge.

Use of the GEBCO Grid indicates that the user accepts the conditions of use and disclaimer information given below.

Users are free to:

Copy, publish, distribute and transmit The GEBCO Grid

Adapt The GEBCO Grid

Commercially exploit The GEBCO Grid, by, for example, combining it with other information, or by including it in their own product or application

Users must:

Acknowledge the source of The GEBCO Grid. A suitable form of attribution is given in the documentation that accompanies The GEBCO Grid.

Not use The GEBCO Grid in a way that suggests any official status or that GEBCO, or the IHO or IOC, endorses any particular application of The GEBCO Grid.

Not mislead others or misrepresent The GEBCO Grid or its source.

Disclaimer

The GEBCO Grid should NOT be used for navigation or for any other purpose involving safety at sea.

The GEBCO Grid is made available 'as is'. While every effort has been made to ensure reliability within the limits of present knowledge, the accuracy and completeness of The GEBCO Grid cannot be guaranteed. No responsibility can be accepted by GEBCO, IHO, IOC, or those involved in its creation or publication for any consequential loss, injury or damage arising from its use or for determining the fitness of The GEBCO Grid for any particular use.

The GEBCO Grid is based on bathymetric data from many different sources of varying quality and coverage.

As The GEBCO Grid is an information product created by interpolation of measured data, the resolution of The GEBCO Grid may be significantly different to that of the resolution of the underlying measured data.

Spatial representation type
Grid
Distance
15  Arc second
Metadata language
en
Character set
UTF8
Topic category
  • Oceans
N
S
E
W
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Number of dimensions
2
Dimension name
Vertical
Dimension name
Time
Cell geometry
Area
Transformation parameter availability
No
Distribution format
  • GeoTIFF ( 1.0 )

OnLine resource
SeaBed 2030 website ( WWW:LINK )
OnLine resource
EMODnet Bathymetry WMTS service ( WWW:LINK )
OnLine resource
EMODnet viewer ( WWW:LINK )
OnLine resource
Gebco 2024 website ( WWW:LINK )

Gebco 2024 website

Hierarchy level
Dataset

Conformance result

Date ( Publication )
2010-12-08
Explanation
See the referenced specification
Description

Introduction

The GEBCO_2024 Grid is a global terrain model for ocean and land, providing elevation data, in meters, on a 15 arc-second interval grid of 43200 rows x 86400 columns, giving 3,732,480,000 data points. The data values are pixel-centre registered i.e. they refer to elevations, in meters, at the centre of grid cells.

The data are available to download according to the Terms of Use provided below.

The grid is accompanied by a Type Identifier (TID) Grid, giving information on the types of source data that the GEBCO_2024 Grid is based on.

The primary GEBCO_2024 grid contains land and ice surface elevation information. A version is also made available with under-ice topography/bathymetry information for Greenland and Antarctica.

The grid was published in July 2024 and is the sixth GEBCO grid developed through The Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project. This is a collaborative project between the Nippon Foundation of Japan and GEBCO. The Seabed 2030 Project aims to bring together all available bathymetric data to produce the definitive map of the world ocean floor and make it available to all.

Grid development

The GEBCO_2024 Grid is a continuous, global terrain model for ocean and land with a spatial resolution of 15 arc seconds. It uses as a ‘base’ version 2.6 of the SRTM15+ data set between latitudes of 50° South and 60° North. This data set is a fusion of land topography with measured and estimated seafloor topography. This version of SRTM15+ is similar to version 2.1 [Tozer et al., 2019] but includes additional data sets. It uses predicted depths based on the V32 gravity model [Sandwell et al., 2019].

The SRTM15+ base grid has been augmented with the gridded bathymetric data sets developed by the four Seabed 2030 Regional Centers to produce the GEBCO_2024 Grid. The Regional Centers have compiled gridded bathymetric data sets, largely based on multibeam data, for their areas of responsibility. These regional grids were then provided to the Global Center. For areas outside of the polar regions (primarily south of 60°N and north of 50°S), these data sets are in the form of 'sparse grids', i.e. only grid cells that contain data were populated. For the polar regions, complete grids were provided due to the complexities of incorporating data held in polar coordinates.

The compilation of the GEBCO_2024 Grid from these regional data grids was carried out at the Global Centre, with the aim of producing a seamless global terrain model. For the 2020 and 2021 releases of the GEBCO grid, the data sets provided as sparse grids by the Regional Centers were included on to the base grid without any blending. This led to discontinuities at the boundary between the regional grids and the base grids in some areas, largely in regions where the base grid is not constrained by measured data, i.e. areas of large differences between the data sets.

For subsequent grid releases, the sparse regional grids have been included on to the base grid using a ‘remove-restore’ blending procedure (Smith and Sandwell, 1997; Becker, Sandwell and Smith, 2009 and Hell and Jakobsson, 2011). This is a two-stage process of computing the difference between the new data and the ‘base’ grid and then gridding the difference and adding the difference back to the existing ‘base’ grid. The aim is to achieve a smooth transition between the 'new' and 'base' data sets with the minimum of perturbation of the existing base data set. However, please note that there may be differences between the 2022 and 2021 grid in regions outside areas of measured data due to the grid merging process. For the polar data sets supplied in the form of complete grids these data sets were included using feather blending techniques from GlobalMapper software version 23.0.1 made available by Blue Marble Geographics. Some additional edits were made to the final grid to remove erroneous values identified in the previous grid and notified to the Global Centre.

The GEBCO_2024 Grid includes data sets from a number of international and national data repositories and regional mapping initiatives. Information on the data sets included in the grid is given in our data contributors list.

Please see the accompanying documentation for more information on the development of the grid Adobe PDF of the documentation to accompany the GEBCO_2024 Grid (0.1 MB).

Ice-surface elevation and under-ice topography

The GEBCO_2024 grid is made available in two versions, containing:

land and ice surface elevation information

under-ice topography information for Greenland and Antarctica

The information for ice-surface elevation and under-ice topography/bathymetry is taken from IceBridge BedMachine Greenland, Version 5 (Morlighem, M. et al. 2017) and data based on MEaSUREs BedMachine Antarctica, Version 2 (Morlighem, M. et al 2020).

Land Data

The land data in the GEBCO Grid are taken directly from SRTM15+ V2.6 data set for all areas outside the Polar regions – see the SRTM15_plus data set documentation for more information. South of 60°S, the land/ ice-surface elevation topography is largely determined from MEaSUREs BedMachine Antarctica, Version 2 (Morlighem, M. et al 2020). For areas north of 60°N, land data are largely taken from the Global Multi-resolution Terrain Elevation Data 2010 (GMTED2010) data set (Danielson, J.J., and Gesch, D.B., 2011). For the Svalbard region, land data are taken from Terrengmodell Svalbard (S0 Terrengmodell), Norwegian Polar Institute (2014).

GEBCO Type Identifier (TID) Grid

The GEBCO Grid is accompanied by a Type Identifier (TID) grid. This data set identifies the type of source data that the corresponding grid cells in the GEBCO Grid are based on. Further information about the format and coding of the TID grid is given below.

File identifier
b86926a1-8653-471b-9954-c0bf29417342 XML
Metadata language
en
Character set
UTF8
Hierarchy level
Dataset
Date stamp
2025-03-07T14:08:49.832192Z
Metadata standard name
ISO 19115:2003/19139 - SEXTANT
Metadata standard version
1.0
 
 

Overviews

overview

Spatial extent

N
S
E
W
thumbnail


Keywords

GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0
Elevation
Mission Atlantic - BODC Parameters
/Marine geology/Gravity, magnetics and bathymetry
Mission Atlantic - Case Studies

Mission Atlantic - Data type (DMP)
Spatial data products
Mission Atlantic - Resources
Data
Mission Atlantic - Work Package
WP4 Benthic Mapping WP6 Dynamics of ecosystem state and resources
Thèmes Sextant
/Physical Environment

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