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How to get data from Digital Earth Australia and ELVIS

By Mazdak Ghasemi · Last checked 12 October 2026

Digital Earth Australia and ELVIS are the two national sources most Australian spatial projects start with, and both are free. Digital Earth Australia gives you satellite imagery of the whole country going back to 1986, already corrected for analysis. ELVIS gives you elevation: LiDAR point clouds, terrain models and bathymetry contributed by every level of government. This guide covers what each one holds and the quickest way to get data out of it.

Which one you need

  • You want to see or measure change on the ground (vegetation, water, fire, land use, coastline): Digital Earth Australia.
  • You want the shape of the ground (slope, flood modelling, line of sight, earthworks, drainage): ELVIS.

Many projects use both: a terrain model from ELVIS under imagery from Digital Earth Australia.

Digital Earth Australia

Geoscience Australia describes Digital Earth Australia (DEA) as a platform that uses satellite data to detect physical changes across Australia. What makes it useful is that the imagery is "analysis ready": corrected so that images from different dates can be compared directly, without you doing the correction yourself.

What it holds

DataPixel sizeAvailable from
Landsat 5 surface reflectance30 m16 August 1986 to 17 November 2011
Landsat 8 surface reflectance15–30 m19 March 2013 to present
Sentinel-2 surface reflectance10–60 m12 July 2015 onwards
Water Observations statistics30 m1986/87 onwards, updated yearly

The imagery products are updated daily and are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, which allows commercial use as long as you credit the source.

DEA also publishes products derived from the imagery, so you may not need to process anything. Water Observations, for example, records for each 30 m pixel how many times it could be clearly seen, how many of those times water was detected, and the resulting percentage. Other derived products include Fractional Cover, Land Cover, Coastlines, Mangroves, Waterbodies and Burnt Area Characteristic Layers.

Four ways to get the data

1. DEA Maps, to look and to export a small area. Open DEA Maps, click "Explore map data", browse to a dataset and choose "Add to the map". If nothing appears where you are looking, use "Filter by location". You can step through time with the timeline, play it as an animation, compare two datasets side by side and use the Difference tool to highlight change. Small areas can be exported as high-resolution TIFF files for use in GIS software, and "Share / Print" gives you a link to the exact map you built.

2. Web services, to use the imagery inside QGIS or ArcGIS. DEA publishes WMS, WMTS and WCS services at https://ows.dea.ga.gov.au/. Add that address as a new connection in your GIS and the layers appear without downloading anything.

3. Direct download, for whole scenes or bulk work. The data sits in a public Amazon S3 bucket named dea-public-data, hosted in Sydney. You do not need an AWS account: you can browse it in a web browser at data.dea.ga.gov.au, and programmatic access works without credentials. Most files are Cloud Optimised GeoTIFFs, which software can read in part without downloading the whole file. To find which files cover your area and dates, search DEA Explorer, which also offers a STAC endpoint for scripted searches.

4. The DEA Sandbox, to analyse without installing anything. The Sandbox is a free, hosted JupyterLab environment with DEA's example notebooks preloaded, running on 2 cores with 16 GB of memory and 10 GB of storage. It is not open to everyone: sign-up requires a recognised Australian government or education email address, and accounts unused for 90 days may have their data removed. If you are not eligible, use DEA Maps, the web services or direct download instead.

ELVIS

ELVIS, the Elevation Information System, is a cloud-based system for discovering and obtaining Australian elevation and bathymetry data for an area of interest. It was developed as a partnership between agencies under the Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping, and it combines open data from Commonwealth, state and territory governments. A single search therefore covers data from all the contributing agencies.

What it holds

  • LiDAR point clouds: the raw laser returns, usually as LAS files.
  • Elevation models derived from LiDAR: gridded terrain you can use straight away.
  • National elevation models, for areas with no LiDAR:
ModelPixel sizeCoverage
LiDAR-derived 5 metre model5 mMore than 245,000 km², from 236 surveys flown between 2001 and 2015
SRTM-derived 1 second modelabout 30 mNational
SRTM-derived 3 second modelabout 90 mNational
GEODATA 9 second modelabout 250 mWhole of Australia
  • Bathymetry: depth data, where it has been captured.

How to order

  1. Open ELVIS and zoom to your site, or use the location search.
  2. Click "Order Data", choose a drawing tool and draw a box around your area.
  3. Click "Search" to list the files available inside the box.
  4. Tick the files you want, enter your contact details and submit.
  5. You receive an email with the selected datasets to download.

Three things to check

  • Bare earth or surface. A terrain model (DTM) has buildings and trees removed; a surface model (DSM) keeps them. Flood and drainage work needs the first, line-of-sight and solar work usually needs the second.
  • Vertical datum. Some point clouds are offered in more than one height reference, such as AHD and ellipsoidal heights. In Australia the two can differ by tens of metres, so never mix them.
  • How recent it is, and whether that is free. What is free varies by state. Queensland, for example, makes LiDAR older than three years free through ELVIS and sells newer captures and some derived products. Check the capture date in the search results before you plan around a dataset.

Related guides

If you are not sure which data fits a project, describe it to Terrascout and it will rank the options, or ask the Copilot.

Sources

Checked on 12 October 2026 against the pages below. Products are added and retired, so confirm on the source page before you rely on a detail.