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A 1/12° global elevation (topography and bathymetry) dataset called
TerrainBase is
available for general use at GFDL. It was created by NOAA's National
Geophysical Data Center and is based on the 1/12° ETOPO5 dataset as
well as several others. TerrainBase should be considered a replacement
for ETOPO5 since it fixes a number of problems (in the land only) of
the older dataset, although TerrainBase itself is not perfect either.
NCAR has converted the original binary data from NGDC to an
ASCII format
(same as used by the ETOPO5 dataset) for maximum portability.
The TerrainBase dataset consists of 4320x2160 gridpoints with longitudes ranging from 0°E to 359°55'0"E and latitudes ranging from 90°N to 89°55'0"S; the netCDF version (created at GFDL) runs from south to north instead. The longitudes and latitudes are uniformly spaced without any projection. The elevations are expressed in integer meters with positive values above sealevel and negative values below. At GFDL, the files are located in "/archive/hnv/TerrainBase/":
- tbase.gz
- tbase_doc
- r_tbase.f
- tbase_16bit.nc
- tbase_32bit.nc
| gzip-compressed ASCII version of the dataset. | |
| Description of the format of the ASCII version. | |
| Simple FORTRAN program to read the ASCII version. | |
| NetCDF version containing the data as 16-bit integer values. Although, these values are "packed", they are identical to those in the 32-bit version since the original values are integer meters which already fit in 16-bits and so the variable's add_offset=0 and scale_factor=1. | |
| NetCDF version containing the data as 32-bit floating-point values. |
Here are some example images created using IRIS Explorer and the TerrainBase dataset:
 Full size 24-bit SGI RGB image ~1333K |
 Full size 24-bit SGI RGB image ~1385K |
Lasted modified: Thursday, 08-Feb-01 20:18:27 EST