Canadian Digital Elevation Model, 1945-2011

This collection is a legacy product that is no longer supported. It may not meet current government standards.

The Canadian Digital Elevation Model (CDEM) is part of Natural Resources Canada's altimetry system designed to better meet the users' needs for elevation data and products.

The CDEM stems from the existing Canadian Digital Elevation Data (CDED). In these data, elevations can be either ground or reflective surface elevations.

A CDEM mosaic can be obtained for a pre-defined or user-defined extent. The coverage and resolution of a mosaic varies according to latitude and to the extent of the requested area.

Derived products such as slope, shaded relief and colour shaded relief maps can also be generated on demand by using the Geospatial-Data Extraction tool. Data can then be saved in many formats.

The pre-packaged GeoTiff datasets are based on the National Topographic System of Canada (NTS) at the 1:250 000 scale; the NTS index file is available in the Resources section in many formats.

Data and Resources

Additional Info

Field	Value
Last Updated	April 17, 2026, 19:40 (UTC)
Created	April 17, 2026, 19:40 (UTC)
contact_email	geoinfo@nrcan-rncan.gc.ca
contact_person	{"fr": "Gouvernement du Canada; Ressources naturelles Canada;Secteur de la politique stratégique et de l’innovation,geoinfo@nrcan-rncan.gc.ca", "en": "Government of Canada; Natural Resources Canada;Strategic Policy and Innovation Sector,,geoinfo@nrcan-rncan.gc.ca"}
criticality_level	[]
data_dictionary	EPSG:4617,https://www.epsg-registry.org,8.6.2
geographic_scope	[]
open_canada_collection	fgp
open_canada_date_published	2015-01-01 00:00:00
open_canada_keywords	{"fr": ["Canada", "Sciences de la Terre", "élévation", "relief", "géomatique", "GéoBase", "MNEC", "MNE", "DEM", "Système d'information géographique", "Géomatique", "Sciences de la terre", "Cartographie", "Géographie", "Données géographiques", "Topographie"], "en": ["Canada", "Earth Sciences", "elevation", "relief", "geomatics", "GeoBase", "CDEM", "DEM", "CDED", "Geographic information systems", "Geomatics", "Earth sciences", "Cartography", "Geography", "Geographic data", "Topography"]}
open_canada_subject	["form_descriptors"]
sensitivity_level	unrestricted
title_fr	Modèle numérique d'élévation du Canada, 1945-2011
update_frequency	not_planned