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dem-copernicus

Copernicus GLO-30 elevation tiles for your map regions, verified

What it does

Downloads the 1 by 1 degree elevation tiles (about 39 MB each, at 30 m) covering your map regions from the Copernicus DEM on AWS open data, verifies each, and keeps them under /usr/local/share/hammunition/data/dem-copernicus/. A square with no published tile (open sea, or land Copernicus does not release) is counted, never guessed at; a region with no published tile at all gets no terrain, and the plan warns by name. dem-qmapshack turns them into QMapShack's hillshade, slope and contours.

Why you would want it

Terrain is the difference between a line on a map and a walk you can judge: how steep, how high, which side of the ridge. Offline, it has to be on the disk first; this is the one place it is fetched, sized in the plan and verified.

Before it will work

Map regions set in station config; the tiles follow them. With none set this unit is deferred by name.

How it installs

  • elevation tiles from copernicus-glo30 for the regions in station config (Copernicus DEM licence (free, with attribution), https://copernicus-dem-30m.s3.amazonaws.com/readme.html)

Known problems

A region is tens to hundreds of tiles. Measured on 2026-09-28: a contiguous US state can exceed 90 tiles (about 3.6 GB), Alaska is 449 tiles (about 17.5 GB), and the 50 states and DC together are 1,447 tiles. The plan prints the count and size per region before anything downloads. Regions reaching across the 180 degree meridian (Alaska, Fiji, New Zealand, Russia's far east) select their tiles like any other; only an outline edge that jumps across it in one segment would be refused, and none measured does. A tile with a row in catalog/data/copernicus-glo30-pins.yaml is checked against a sha256 Hammunition measured ("sha256, pinned by Hammunition"); any other only against the MD5 in the publisher's object metadata ("MD5 from the publisher's object metadata; not pinned by Hammunition"), which catches a damaged download, not a deliberately altered one. The first install of a region asks Geofabrik for its outline to choose its tiles and remembers the answer, so later plans need no network; until that first install, every plan, a dry run included, asks again, so an offline dry run before it cannot choose tiles. Tile names encode latitude and longitude, so they are shown in the plan only. The licence requires attribution to the Copernicus programme in anything you publish from the data.

Keeping it current

  • probe: none
  • strategy: reinstall
  • A tile changes only when the publisher's tile list changes. New regions bring their tiles on the next install; a tile no region needs is removed.

Where to get help with the software itself

The dataset's readme on the bucket (https://copernicus-dem-30m.s3.amazonaws.com/readme.html) and the Copernicus Space Data helpdesk.

Source: catalog/packages/dem-copernicus.yaml