Hawai‘i - Statewide Elevation Data

DEM

• 10m USGS DEMs for all the islands are available, and they're very good quality
  • aside from normal USGS distribution, they are also online at UW 10-meter Data
• the USGS Hawai'i Clearinghouse surprisingly does not have DEM, but for each island it has a variety of other layers including hillshaded JPEG images

NEXTMap

• 5m commercial LIDAR-derived elevation is available, as NEXTMap^® USA Hawaii Datasets
• Price for the DTM is $25/km2, which is around $5,400 for a USGS quad, with a $500 minimum order.

Bathymetry

• SOEST Main Hawaiian Islands Multibeam Synthesis
  • freely available: the "Complete Multibeam Synthesis" is 50m, a 334 MB netCDF file
  • a reduced resolution "Regional Grid" is 1km, 1.8MB, with the unknown areas filled in with the Smith&Sandwell global dataset
  • older free data: keating_public.grd (4.5 MB), netCDF grid of Hawaiian Island chain
    • resolution: 1 arc-minute (~2 km)
    • dimensions: 1561 * 901
• SOEST Hawaii Coastal Geology Group
  • has pointers to the SHOALS LIDAR bathymetry for each island
  • unfortunately they are not in any raster format; only massive, irregularly-distributed point data files
  • they say the data is from the main SHOALS site
• SHOALS (Scanning Hydrographic Operational Airborne LIDAR Survey)
  • their Online Hawaiian Data has bathymetric point data for much of the coastlines of each island
  • The islands of Kauai, Maui, and parts of Molokai and Oahu were surveyed in 1999. The survey conducted in 2000 included the islands of Hawaii, Maui, Molokai, Lanai, Oahu, and Kauai.
  • this data has already been converted from .xyx point data to rasters and is available on the SOEST site above (as rasters?)
  • main site says "***Sorry, Data Download capabilities have temporarily been disabled.***"
• USGS Pacific Sea Floor Mapping: Hawaiian Islands
  • has data for a few areas around the islands, farther from shore than the SHOALS data
  • they are in UTM 4/5, with 20m grid spacing - very nice!
  • the format is GeoTIFF, and the values appear to be offset by +65536
  • i've also encountered a chopped-up version of this dataset, in Surfer GRD format, without the offset problem, from a person at UH
• NGDC TerrainBase
  • has some "30 minute" "regular grid" data for the "Hawaiian Islands coast"
  • however, it's quite spotty, misses whole islands

See also Elevation/Bathymetry for the Big Island