Drainage Catchment Digital Elevation Models for Regional Analysis

Australia's drainage catchment Digital Elevation Model collection provides regional-scale topographic data. Geoscience Australia created the mosaicked raster products using open elevation data from the Elvis Elevation and Depth system. The collection was last updated in April 2026.

Use Cases

• Model water movement through landscapes using the ground surface topography represented in the DEM raster.
• Assess potential fire spread paths by analyzing the topographic features within a specific drainage catchment.
• Fill resolution gaps between local high-resolution data and national low-resolution mosaics for regional planning projects.
• Inspect catchment metadata attributes, such as boundaries and source data details, using the provided shapefile in a GIS.

Strengths

• Provides a regional-scale product bridging a critical gap between local high-resolution and national low-resolution elevation data.
• Each catchment is delivered as a single mosaicked raster file, simplifying data access and use for analysis.

Limitations

• Specific spatial resolution, row/column counts, and the total number of available catchments are not provided in the description.
• Metadata is supplied in a Word document format, which is less machine-readable than structured formats like JSON or XML.

Provenance

Source

Geoscience Australia Data.

Collection Method

Created using open elevation data sourced from the Elvis Elevation and Depth system.

Freshness

Updated as of April 2026.

Geography

Australia.