ELVIS Elevation Data: How to Get Australian LiDAR and DEMs

Summary

• ELVIS (Elevation and Depth, Foundation Spatial Data) is Australia’s national portal for free elevation data. Geoscience Australia hosts it, and it gathers LiDAR point clouds, DEMs and bathymetry from Commonwealth, state and territory agencies working under ICSM.
• Ordering needs no account and costs nothing. One order covers up to about 1.5 degrees square and 15 GB, arrives as an emailed link to a zip file, and there is no limit on how many orders you place.
• Free depends on the custodian. Queensland LiDAR under three years old is sold, not downloaded. Victorian data in ELVIS is licensed CC BY-NC, so paid work needs a licence from an authorised provider. Restricted datasets stay with their owners.
• ELVIS heights are AHD, and satellite camera models expect ellipsoidal heights. The gap runs from -32.5 m at Perth to +62.7 m at Cairns. Used uncorrected in orthorectification, it puts Cairns imagery about 23 m out at a 20° look angle.
• Where no LiDAR has been flown, ELVIS falls back to the 1 second SRTM DEM, about 30 m, measured from the Space Shuttle in February 2000. For those sites, and for ground that has changed since it was flown, a stereo satellite DEM is the usual next step.

If you’ve ended up here, you probably have a site somewhere in Australia and one question: is there LiDAR over it, and how do you get it out of ELVIS? The short answer is that ELVIS elevation data is free, often excellent, and less simple than its download button suggests. We should say up front that Geopera sells satellite elevation data, so we have some interest in ELVIS coming up short. Mostly it doesn’t. Where ELVIS has recent LiDAR over your site, that LiDAR will beat anything we can measure from orbit, and you should use it. This guide covers what ELVIS holds, how to order from it, which states charge, and one trap in the heights that catches almost everyone who puts ELVIS data next to satellite imagery.

What Is ELVIS?

ELVIS stands for Elevation and Depth, Foundation Spatial Data, though the portal’s own header spells it Elvis. It’s a cloud system for finding and downloading Australian elevation and bathymetry data, built as a partnership between agencies under the Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping (ICSM) and hosted by Geoscience Australia at elevation.fsdf.org.au. Geoscience Australia reported orders rising from 2,600 in 2015 to 20,000 in 2017, after automation cut delivery time by 90%.

ELVIS is a catalogue and delivery service sitting over many separate datasets. Each one belongs to a custodian: a state mapping agency, Geoscience Australia itself, a marine survey programme. ELVIS finds what those custodians have released, cuts it to your area and packs it into a zip. So the rules on price, licence, datum and file format can change the moment your area of interest crosses a state border, and most of the confusion people have with ELVIS data comes from treating it as one dataset when it’s dozens.

What ELVIS Elevation Data Contains

The map legend is the quickest summary. DEM coverage is sorted into tiers of under 1 m, 1 m, 2 m, 5 m, 10 m and 1 second, plus a separate Restricted category. Bathymetry has its own tiers, from under 5 m down to 100 m. Behind those tiers sit a handful of product families:

Sources: the ELVIS portal, Geoscience Australia’s digital elevation data page, the Queensland elevation and LiDAR guide and the NSW Elevation Data Product Specification (October 2024).

The national 5 m DEM deserves a sense of scale. 245,000 km² is about 3% of Australia’s 7.69 million km², and every survey in it was flown in 2015 or earlier. State programmes have flown far more since then, and ELVIS lists that newer data too, but nobody publishes a single current figure for national LiDAR coverage, and we’re not going to invent one. The honest way to find out what covers your site is to draw a box and look.

If the difference between a DEM, a DSM and a DTM is fuzzy, our guide to digital elevation data types sorts it out. The short version for ELVIS: the LiDAR-derived grids are bare earth, and the point clouds hold everything, trees and roofs included.

How to Download LiDAR from ELVIS

The ordering flow takes a few minutes once you’ve seen it. These steps follow the portal’s own help text as of September 2026.

Size is the first thing to plan for. The portal warns that “these files can be huge”, and it’s right. A single 2 km by 2 km tile at 4 points per square metre, the floor in current NSW data, holds at least 16 million points before a single one is classified. A catchment-sized request of point clouds will blow through the 15 GB cap long before it reaches the 1.5-degree limit. Order the DEM first, work out where you actually need the point cloud, and order that separately. There’s no limit on the number of orders. For extents bigger than the portal allows, Geoscience Australia takes requests at [email protected], and warns there may be a cost.

One quieter trap sits in the transformation options. The reprojection list offers GDA94 MGA zones, while newer state data such as the NSW programme is delivered in GDA2020. The two datums differ by 1.5 to 1.8 m horizontally across the continent (we computed 1.5 m at Sydney, 1.7 m at Cairns and 1.8 m at Perth with PROJ’s standard transformation). That’s invisible on a 30 m grid and a real error on a point cloud specified to ±0.8 m. Before you mosaic tiles from different surveys, check which datum each one came in.

Is ELVIS LiDAR Data Free? The Rules by State

ELVIS’s own FAQ says its data is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution and freely available. That’s true of most of it, and the exceptions are the part that matters if the data feeds paid work.

We didn’t verify the current rules for South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania, the Northern Territory or the ACT, so check the licence panel on each dataset before you rely on it. The portal shows it per dataset for a reason.

The Victorian row is the one consultants should read twice. Downloading a Victorian DEM from ELVIS and using it in a paid flood study is commercial use, and CC BY-NC doesn’t allow it, however freely the download button gave it to you. Victoria’s LiDAR is also unusually complete: it covers about 60% of the state’s land area and about 99% of its populated areas, per the Vicmap Elevation metadata. So for Victorian sites, the licence decides access more often than coverage does.

What the ICSM Quality Levels Mean

Australian LiDAR is flown to the ICSM Australian Airborne LiDAR Acquisition Specification, version 2.0 of which was endorsed in July 2025. It sorts surveys into quality levels, and the level tells you more about fitness for purpose than the grid size does.

A vertical accuracy of ±0.30 m at 95% means that at 19 of every 20 independent check points, the LiDAR surface sits within 30 cm of the surveyed height. That’s the grade the national 5 m DEM’s source surveys were held to. The specification also sets classification levels, requiring 95%, 98% or 99% of ground points to be correctly classified within any 1 km by 1 km area.

Grid spacing and accuracy are separate numbers, a point we made at length for satellite pixels in our ground sample distance explainer. A 1 m DEM interpolated from a QL0 survey has fine posts and loose heights. Check the survey’s metadata for its quality level, not just the resolution tier on the map.

The NSW specification is also refreshingly frank about known anomalies, and they apply well beyond NSW: holes in DEMs across adjoining tiles where ground points are missing, straight interpolation lines across waterways, buildings classified as vegetation and the reverse, spurious points over water, and residual sensor noise. NSW DEMs aren’t hydrologically enforced either, so run a fill or breach step before routing water across them.

The Datum Trap: AHD Heights and Satellite Imagery

Heights look like the simplest thing in an elevation file. They aren’t.

ELVIS data is delivered, almost everywhere, in heights on the Australian Height Datum. AHD was fixed in 1971 by setting mean sea level to zero at tide gauges around the coast, and it’s a physical height: the kind water flows downhill on. ICSM’s specification also allows the newer Australian Vertical Working Surface, so read the metadata rather than assuming. Satellite imagery works in a different system. The rational polynomial coefficients that describe a satellite camera expect heights above the ellipsoid, a smooth mathematical shape with no idea where the sea is, and orthorectification tools say so plainly. The gap between the two surfaces is the geoid separation. Geoscience Australia publishes it as AUSGeoid2020, a one-minute grid over the whole country, and we sampled it at fourteen places.

A height error only matters sideways when the satellite isn’t looking straight down, and it almost never is. Tilt the camera and every point placed at the wrong height slides sideways along the look direction, by the height error times the tangent of the look angle. So the same mistake, made in the same software on the same afternoon, is harmless in Adelaide, where AHD and the ellipsoid almost coincide, and 23 metres in Cairns. Across the Bowen Basin it’s 19 m at 20°. Nothing errors when this happens. The image comes out sharp, and it doesn’t line up with your LiDAR.

The fixes are all cheap once you know to apply them. Queensland publishes point clouds as both AHD and ellipsoid LAS files, and NSW file names carry AHD or ELL, so for imagery work you can often just take the ellipsoidal version. Otherwise convert: ellipsoidal height is AHD height plus the AUSGeoid2020 separation, and the grid is free. In GDAL, give the DEM a compound coordinate system with its vertical datum and the RPC transformer can apply the shift for you. Our orthorectification walkthrough covers the rest of that pipeline.

Where ELVIS Runs Out

ELVIS fails in two ways, and neither one is the portal’s fault.

The first is coverage. Where no LiDAR has been flown, and the portal itself notes there are many such areas, the finest grid on offer is the 1 second SRTM DEM: about 30 m posts, measured by radar from the Space Shuttle over eleven days in February 2000. Geoscience Australia’s own description notes it “is not free from artefacts”. It’s a good regional model, and our roundup of free DEM sources compares it with the other 30 m global grids. It won’t design a haul road.

The second is age. LiDAR records the ground on the day it was flown, and some ground doesn’t sit still. A pit, a waste dump, a rehabilitated slope, a river channel after a flood: for any of these, a survey from 2015 describes ground that may no longer exist. Queensland’s three-year rule means the newest data is exactly the data that costs money.

Both gaps are where satellite elevation earns its keep. A stereo pair is two images of the same ground taken from different angles on one orbital pass, and the parallax between them is height. Our stereo imagery explainer covers how that becomes a DEM, and sensors such as WorldView-3 collect it over almost any site, cloud permitting, without a flying season or a crew on the ground. For a sense of the turnaround: from WorldView-3 stereo strips released on 31 August 2026, we built a half-metre elevation model of a Nepal flood corridor and published it the next day.

The limits are real. Optical stereo measures the top surface, canopy and roofs included, and it won’t match the ±0.30 m of a QL2 survey. If you hold ELVIS LiDAR over part of a site, it stays useful after a satellite DEM arrives, as the reference the satellite surface should be tied to. Bring your ground data, and we make it agree with the satellite record, in AHD or ellipsoidal heights, whichever you work in.

So check ELVIS first. If it has recent LiDAR over your site, you’re done, and it cost nothing. If it hands you a 30 m grid from 2000, that’s the moment to look up.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is ELVIS elevation data?

ELVIS (Elevation and Depth, Foundation Spatial Data) is Australia’s national portal for elevation and bathymetry data, hosted by Geoscience Australia and run through ICSM. It serves LiDAR point clouds, DEMs from under 1 m to 1 second SRTM, and bathymetry, delivered free as an emailed zip.

Is ELVIS LiDAR data free?

Mostly, yes. Most ELVIS data is Creative Commons Attribution and free to download. The exceptions: Queensland LiDAR under three years old is sold, Victorian data is CC BY-NC so commercial use needs a licence, and restricted datasets come from their custodian, possibly at a cost.

What format is ELVIS LiDAR data in?

Point clouds come as LAS or compressed LAZ, version 1.4. DEMs can be delivered as GeoTIFF, Esri ASCII Grid or MapInfo NGrid through the portal’s transformation options. NSW’s current programme also publishes a 1 m Cloud Optimised GeoTIFF DEM in 1 km tiles.

What vertical datum does ELVIS use?

Most ELVIS heights are on the Australian Height Datum (AHD71). ICSM’s specification also allows the Australian Vertical Working Surface. Satellite orthorectification needs ellipsoidal heights, so add the AUSGeoid2020 separation (-32.5 m at Perth to +62.7 m at Cairns) first, or use Queensland’s ellipsoid LAS files.

How big an area can I download from ELVIS?

Each order can cover about 1.5 degrees square, up to 15 GB per request, and there’s no limit on the number of orders. Split large point cloud jobs into several orders. For bigger extents, email [email protected]; Geoscience Australia notes there may be a cost.