ArcticDEM: Free 2-Meter Elevation Data for the Entire Arctic

The Polar Geospatial Center's ArcticDEM provides 2m resolution terrain data for all land above 60°N, free and open to all. Here's how to access it and what you can do with it.

ArcticDEM is a product of the Polar Geospatial Center at the University of Minnesota, funded by the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Science Foundation. It covers all land north of 60°N at 2-meter horizontal resolution, with vertical accuracy typically better than 1 meter. It is free, publicly available, and updated regularly as new stereo satellite imagery is processed.

The dataset is generated from commercial stereo imagery, primarily WorldView-1, WorldView-2, WorldView-3, and GeoEye-1, using photogrammetric point cloud processing. The result is a suite of raster elevation tiles that can be downloaded as GeoTIFF files, ingested into GIS software, or accessed via cloud-optimized formats. The entire mosaic at 2m resolution covers over 20 million square kilometers.

Access is through the Polar Geospatial Center's public S3 bucket and through the OpenTopography portal. For most users, the 10m or 32m resolution mosaics are sufficient for regional analysis and are far more manageable in size. The 2m strips are useful for site-specific engineering analysis, slope stability assessment, and change detection. Strips from different acquisition dates can be differenced to detect terrain change. This is how researchers measure thermokarst expansion and coastal erosion rates.

For infrastructure siting, ArcticDEM enables several critical analyses. Slope mapping identifies terrain too steep for safe construction or pipeline routing. Drainage basin delineation reveals flood risk and active layer runoff patterns. Hillshade visualization reveals micro-topographic features: ice-wedge polygon networks, thaw lakes, pingos, that indicate ground ice distribution and should influence foundation design.

Change detection is arguably ArcticDEM's most powerful application. By differencing two strips from different years at the same location, engineers and researchers can quantify ground surface lowering from thaw subsidence. Published studies using ArcticDEM have documented subsidence rates of 1–15 cm/year in ice-rich permafrost terrain, with rates accelerating in warmer years. For sites where earlier imagery exists, this gives you a direct measure of how the ground is moving before you commit to a design.

Limitations worth noting: ArcticDEM is a surface model (DSM), not a bare-earth model (DEM). Vegetation, snow, and buildings are included in the elevation values. In open tundra this is rarely a problem, but in areas with shrub vegetation or shallow snow cover, vertical errors can reach 0.5–2m. Cloud cover during image acquisition creates data gaps; some remote areas have fewer valid strip acquisitions than others. The PGC provides a strip index showing coverage density. Check it for your site before relying on the product.

For teams working with ArcticDEM programmatically, the data is available via STAC (SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog) API, enabling filtered queries by bounding box and date range. GDAL, QGIS, ArcGIS Pro, and Python's rasterio library can all read the GeoTIFF files directly from S3 without downloading. Circumpolar's AI assistant can pull ArcticDEM-derived slope and terrain statistics for any pinned location. Try asking about terrain and elevation when you drop a pin on the map.