SES-01. ETOPO 2022: NOAA’s new seamless topography-and-bathymetry bare earth surface elevation dataset

Abstract
ETOPO1, NOAA’s prior release of global, seamless, bare-earth topographic and bathymetric elevation data at 1-arc-minute resolution, has been a widely-used benchmark global digital elevation model (DEM) since its initial release in 2010. Tsunami forecasting, modeling, and warning systems critically rely upon accurate topographic and bathymetric data to predict and reproduce water inundation across ocean surfaces and over landscapes. Here we present the new release of ETOPO 2022, an updated topo-bathy bare-earth dataset at 15-arc-second global resolution, and the updated Coastal Relief Models (CRMs) at 1-arc-second resolution over a subset of U.S. Coastal land and waters. ETOPO 2022 represents a forest-and-buildings-removed bare-earth dataset for both the surface and/or bed elevations over the polar ice sheets. The ETOPO 2022 project draws from more than a dozen source datasets for land topography, sea bathymetry, lake bathymetry, and ice-sheet bed elevation data, all of which have been carefully evaluated for quality, accuracy, and seamless integration. We evaluate the relative and absolute vertical accuracies of all land-elevation input datasets, as well as the final ETOPO 2022 tiles, using a geographically-optimized database of land- and-forest elevation photons from NASA’s ICESat-2 satellite mission over the calendar year 2021, with more than 780 billion lidar measurements spanning nearly the entire globe as an independent validation dataset. ETOPO 2022 is publicly available in both GeoTiff and NetCDF formats in 15x15° tiles, and CRMs available in 1x1° tiles. Ancillary metadata layers valuable to modelers are present in the NetCDF tiles. ETOPO 2022 provides a new, publicly-available, seamless, globally-validated, bare- earth elevation dataset to meet the present and future needs of the scientific global hazard and mapping communities.