Download LINZ LiDAR elevation data for any NZ area

Who uses this

• GIS analysts and surveyors. Get a clipped DEM for a site without tile wrangling.
• CAD users. Pull contours, or the ground as a 3D DXF or LandXML surface, straight into CAD.
• Makers and educators. Download an STL of any NZ landscape to 3D print.

When to use it

• You want the elevation model itself for GIS, CAD, drainage or structural software.
• You want to 3D print a block, a mountain or a coastline.
• You want contours in a specific format without generating them on screen first.
• You want the aerial photo of a site to trace over in CAD or lay under your own GIS data.

Which tool for your job

Download Data is one step in a bigger question. These are the jobs it helps with, and the tools that go with it.

How to use it

1. Select a property, draw an area or upload a boundary.
2. Choose the product: contours, a DEM raster, a mesh, a CAD surface (3D DXF or LandXML) or the aerial photo, and the format.
3. Set the contour interval or the mesh options where they apply, or pick which photo, then download.
4. Or choose Property Data ZIP and tick the parts to get several of these in one ZIP, with a README and manifest.json.

Step by step: Mt Iron, Wānaka

We set up a download of the terrain around Mt Iron.

What it showed

• The panel shows the output resolution before you download: 1 m for a small site, coarser for a large area.
• For the aerial photo it names the photo, its licensor and its pixel size first, so you know what the file will hold before you pay.

Screenshots from NZ Elevation Tools. Aerial imagery from LINZ Basemaps. Sourced from the LINZ Data Service and licensed by Environment Southland, Otago Regional Council and Queenstown-Lakes District Council for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.

How it works

The 1 m LiDAR bare-earth model is loaded for the area, resampled to fit the export size cap, and written in the chosen format. The GeoTIFF is in NZTM2000, compressed, with each pixel holding the height in metres to 1 cm. Contours over areas larger than 3 km per side are built a little coarser when there are too many levels, and the panel says so after the download. Meshes are thinned from the same grid, with a base so they print as a solid.

The 3D DXF and LandXML files are the ground itself at true scale: one point at the centre of each grid cell in NZTM2000 metres with its height, joined into two triangles per cell. Cells with no data are left out rather than filled. The 3D DXF writes each triangle as a 3DFACE on layer TERRAIN, in full NZTM coordinates or near 0,0 to match the contour DXF. LandXML lists each point as northing, easting, elevation, the order LandXML uses.

Each 3DFACE repeats its third corner as the fourth, the usual CAD way to write a triangle. GDAL and QGIS may warn "Non closed ring" when they open the 3D DXF; the warning is harmless and the triangles read correctly.

Every file names the LiDAR survey and its licensor in its metadata or an accompanying attribution.

The aerial photo is read from the original LINZ photo files for the survey, not from map tiles. The newest photo that covers the whole area is picked, with a sharper one up to a year older preferred; any other photo of the area, back to the historic scans, can be chosen instead. The GeoTIFF and PNG keep the photo on its own NZTM2000 pixel grid; the KMZ is resampled to longitude and latitude for Google Earth. Each file names the survey, its capture years and its licensor.

Along parts of the coast LINZ has flown coastal LiDAR that also measures the seabed in shallow water. Where it exists it is used first, so the file carries the seabed as heights below 0 m in NZVD2016, like the land. Water too deep or murky for it to reach the bottom is left empty rather than filled with a flat water surface. Seabed heights are not for navigation.

Reading the results

The panel shows the output resolution before you download. Areas up to 3 km per side are delivered at 1 m; a 12 km area at roughly 4 m per pixel. STL and OBJ meshes are coarser, and the panel shows their detail too. 3D DXF and LandXML surfaces are 1 m up to 1 km per side and coarser above, about 11 to 12 m at 12 km; the panel shows the cell size, point and triangle counts and the largest the file can be.

The share of the area that came from the 8 m fallback is reported, and the file is not survey grade where that share is high.

For the aerial photo, the panel names the photo and its licensor and gives the pixel size before you download: the photo's own resolution, unless the image would be more than 6000 pixels across, when it halves until it fits. White means outside the photo.

Limits and warnings

• Areas up to 12 km across.
• Full 1 m detail covers areas up to 3 km per side. Very dense contours on steep land need a larger interval or a smaller area.
• A 3D DXF of a 1 km area at 1 m holds about 2 million triangles and runs to several hundred MB. Keep CAD surfaces small, or use the GeoTIFF where your software can build its own surface.
• The 3D DXF and LandXML surfaces are indicative, not survey-grade.
• Aerial photos up to 5 km across. Satellite and false-colour infrared captures are not offered.
• An aerial photo can sit a little off true ground position, more so on steep ground, tall buildings and old scans. It is not evidence of a boundary.
• The files are yours to use commercially under CC BY 4.0, with the licensor credited.

Data and attribution

Files are built on our server from the LINZ national 1 m LiDAR bare-earth elevation model, with the national 8 m model filling any gaps and LINZ coastal LiDAR adding the seabed where it has been flown.

Elevation and cadastral data is sourced from the LINZ Data Service and licensed for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. Copyright in each LiDAR survey belongs to the body that commissioned it — a regional or district council, Waka Kotahi, NIWA and around thirty others — rather than to LINZ, which hosts and processes the national dataset. Every file exported from this site names the licensors whose surveys cover the area, and anything you publish from those files carries the same attribution requirement. See https://www.linz.govt.nz/products-services/data/licensing-and-using-data/attributing-elevation-or-aerial-imagery-data

Questions

Related

Neighbouring tools

• Contour Lines — Draws topographic contours at any interval from 0.5 m upward across your area and exports them for GIS, CAD, Google Earth, print or laser cutting.
• Terrain Stats — Summarises the minimum, maximum, mean and range of ground elevation across an area, with a chart of how much land sits at each height.
• Elevate a File — Adds accurate ground elevation to the coordinates in a GPX, KML, GeoJSON, JSON or CSV file you already have, replacing missing or noisy GPS altitude.
• Aerial History — Steps through every LINZ aerial photo of a spot, back to the 1930s in places, and swipes between any of them and today’s map.

Guides

• Download DEM Data for New Zealand
• 3D Print a Terrain Model
• Download Contours as GeoJSON