World Settlement Footprint (WSF) 3D - Building Area - Global, 90m

The World Settlement Footprint (WSF) 3D provides detailed quantification of the average height, total volume, total area and the fraction of buildings at 90 m resolution at a global scale.


It is generated using a modified version of the World Settlement Footprint human settlements mask derived from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellite imagery in combination with digital elevation data and radar imagery collected by the TanDEM-X mission.

The framework includes three basic workflows: i) the estimation of the mean building height based on an analysis of height differences along potential building edges, ii) the determination of building fraction and total building area within each 90 m cell, and iii) the combination of the height information and building area in order to determine the average height and total built-up volume at 90 m gridding.

In addition, global height information on skyscrapers and high-rise buildings provided by the Emporis database is integrated into the processing framework, to improve the WSF 3D Building Height and subsequently the Building Volume Layer.

A comprehensive validation campaign has been performed to assess the accuracy of the dataset quantitatively by using VHR 3D building models from 19 globally distributed regions (~86,000 km2) as reference data.


The WSF 3D standard layers are provided in the format of Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW)-compressed GeoTiff files, with each file - or image tile - covering an area of 1 x 1 ° geographical lat/lon at a geometric resolution of 2.8 arcsec (~ 90 m at the equator). Following the system established by the TDX-DEM mission, the latitude resolution is decreased in multiple steps when moving towards the poles to compensate for the reduced circumference of the Earth.

INSPIRE

Identification

File identifier
4208a63e-228b-4601-b4d9-a2b345fd1027 XML
Hierarchy level
Dataset
Online resource
Protocol

WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link
Protocol

OGC:WMS
Protocol

OGC:WMS-http-get-capabilities
Protocol

WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link
Protocol

WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link
Protocol

WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link
Resource identifier
code

https://geoservice.dlr.de/catalogue/srv/metadata/4208a63e-228b-4601-b4d9-a2b345fd1027

Metadata language
English
Spatial representation type
Grid
Encoding
Format

Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF
Projection
code
EPSG:4326
 

Classification of data and services

Topic category
  • Imagery base maps earth cover
 

Classification of data and services

Coupled resource

Coupled resource
 
 

Classification of data and services

Coupled resource

Coupled resource
 
 

Keywords

GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0

  • Land cover

Other keywords

Keywords

  • opendata

  • DLR

  • EOC

  • building height

  • building density

  • building volume

  • urbanization

  • 3D

  • global

  • Sentinel-1

  • Sentinel-2

  • TanDEM-X

  • inspireidentifiziert
 
 

Geographic coverage

N
S
E
W
thumbnail


 

Temporal reference

Temporal extent
Begin
2012-01-01T00:00:00
End
2019-12-31T23:59:00
Temporal extent
Date (Creation)
2023-02-15T00:00:00
 

Quality and validity

Lineage

The World Settlement Footprint 3D human settlements mask derived from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellite imagery in combination with digital elevation data and radar imagery collected by the TanDEM-X mission.
Denominator
180000
 

Conformity

Conformity
Conformity
 

Conformity

Conformity
Conformity
Explanation

See the referenced specification
 

Restrictions on access and use

Access constraints
Es gelten keine Zugriffsbeschränkungen.
Access constraints

Nutzungsbedingungen: Lizenz, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 / terms of use: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Access constraints

{"id": "cc-by/4.0",

"name": "Creative Commons Namensnennung - 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)",

"url": " http://dcat-ap.de/def/licenses/cc-by/4.0 ",

"quelle": "Copyright DLR (year of production)"}
 

Responsible organization (s)

Contact for the resource
Organisation name

German Aerospace Center (DLR)
Email

geoservice@dlr.de

Organisation name

German Aerospace Center (DLR)
Email

Thomas.Esch@dlr.de

Organisation name

DLR/EOC Land Surface Dynamics
Email

wsf@dlr.de

 

Responsible organization (s)

Contact for the resource
Organisation name

German Aerospace Center (DLR)
Email

geoservice@dlr.de

Organisation name

German Aerospace Center (DLR)
Email

Thomas.Esch@dlr.de

Organisation name

DLR/EOC Land Surface Dynamics
Email

wsf@dlr.de

 

Metadata information

Contact for the metadata
Organisation name

German Aerospace Center(DLR)
Email

geoservice@dlr.de

Date stamp
2025-02-03T09:03:30
Metadata language
English
Character set
UTF8
 
 

SDS

Conformance class 1: invocable

Access Point URL
Endpoint URL
Technical specification
 

Conformance class 2: interoperable

Access constraints

Limitation
 

Use constraints

Limitation
 

Responsible custodian

Contact for the resource
 
 
 

Overviews

overview
large_thumbnail
overview
thumbnail

Spatial extent

N
S
E
W
thumbnail


Keywords

GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0
Land cover

Provided by

Access to the portal

Associated resources

Not available