The Digital Elevation Model over Europe from the GMES RDA project (EU-DEM) is a Digital Surface Model (DSM) representing the first surface as illuminated by the sensors. EU-DEM covers the 39 member and cooperating countries of EEA and it has been produced by a consortium led by Indra. Intermap edited the EU-DEM and AGI (Aerogeodezijos Institutas) provided the water mask. The EU-DEM dataset is a realisation of the Copernicus programme, managed by the European Commission, DG Enterprise and Industry. The EU-DEM is a 3D raster dataset with elevations captured at 1 arc second postings (2.78E-4 degrees) or about every 30 metre. It is a hybrid product based on SRTM and ASTER GDEM data fused by a weighted averaging approach. The EU-DEM has been generated as a contiguous dataset divided into 1 degree by 1 degree tiles corresponding to the SRTM naming convention. The spatial reference system is geographic, lat/lon with horizontal datum ETRS89, ellipsoid GRS80 and vertical datum EVRS2000 with geoid EGG08.  These tiles have then been aggregated into 5°x5° tiles which have been projected to ETRS-LAEA by JRC.

In addition, a colour shaded relief image over Europe has been created using a hillshade dataset derived from the ETRS89-LAEA version of EU-DEM. Please note that this dataset cannot be used for analysis purposes and that there are some known artefacts West of Norway.

All three datasets of Version 1 are made available as tiles (5x5° or 1000x1000km) and as single files:
- EU-DEM in ETRS89 (EPSG code 4258)
- EU-DEM in ETRS89-LAEA geographic (EPSG code 3035)
- Colour shaded relief image over Europe in ETRS89-LAEA (EPSG code 3035)

The datasets are encoded as GeoTIFF with LZW compression (tiles) or DEFLATE compression (European mosaics as single files).

Ownership of EU-DEM belongs to European Commission, DG Enterprise and Industry.

Access to data governed by Commission delegated regulation (EU) No 12386/13 of 12.7.2013
supplementing Regulation (EU) No 911/2010 of the European Parliament and of the Council
on the European Earth monitoring programme (GMES) by establishing registration and
licensing conditions for GMES users and defining criteria for restricting access to GMES
dedicated data and GMES service information.
The following credit must be displayed when using these data: Data funded under GMES
preparatory action 2009 on Reference Data Access by the European Commission, DG
Enterprise and Industry.

We kindly ask any users to cite this data in any published material produced using this data. Please cite the dataset for the Version 1 as:  European Commission – DG ENTR, 2012, EU-DEM Version 1, available from http:// http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/gisco_Geographical_information_maps/introduction and http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/eu-dem.