Global Height Above Nearest Drainage Model at 30-Meter Resolution

Height Above Nearest Drainage (HAND) is a global terrain model providing near-worldwide land coverage at 30 meters per pixel. It was produced by The Alaska Satellite Facility (ASF) from the 2021 Copernicus GLO-30 Public DEM and is distributed via the AWS Open Data Registry. Each pixel value represents the vertical distance to the nearest drainage channel.

Use Cases

• Modeling flood inundation extents based on the normalized topography and local drainage potentials described.
• Assessing relative soil gravitational potentials for agricultural or ecological studies based on the HAND terrain model.
• Mapping hydrological connectivity and watershed characteristics based on the distance-to-drainage pixel values.
• Supporting disaster preparedness and response planning for flood-prone areas using the standardized elevation data.

Strengths

• Provides near-worldwide spatial coverage.
• Offers a standardized 30-meter spatial resolution derived from the Copernicus GLO-30 DEM.
• Data is openly licensed under CC0-1.0.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.
• Row count and total dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

The Alaska Satellite Facility (ASF)

Collection Method

Produced from the 2021 release of the Copernicus GLO-30 Public DEM.

Time Range

Based on 2021 source data; temporal coverage of the derived model is not specified.

Freshness

Last updated date is unknown.

Geography

Near-worldwide land coverage.