Product supply

Available formats for the product

OS Terrain 5 is available as:

• 5m grid in ASCII grid and GML 3.2.1 (simple features profile – level 0).

• 5m contours and spot heights in Esri shapefile or GML 3.2.1 (simple features profile – level 0).

Product supply mechanism

OS Terrain 5 data is provided as a full set of Great Britain in tiles and is available as a download only from the OS Data Hub or OS Orders. The national dataset is supplied as 5km-by-5km tiles of data. There are 10,579 data tiles in the product representing each 5km-by-5km tile grid square. Please note that there are slightly fewer data tiles in the contour set (10,572) due to the lack of real-world changes in height in those areas. There are metadata files for these tiles.

It is recommended that a download manager is used to extract the data as this additional functionality will be able to automate the process and organise the data folders as desired. There are many commercial and open-source download clients available to help manage the data.

Coverage and file sizes

OS Terrain 5 is full national coverage of Great Britain. Terrain 5 is derived from the same source data as our large-scale revision programme.

Data will be compressed using the zip compression method and is not encrypted. The respective file sizes for a full national supply of OS Terrain 5, in each format, is approximately:

• Grid: 16GB compressed

• Contours (GML): 2.6GB compressed

• Contours (shapefile): 2.5GB compressed

Product update schedule

OS Terrain 5 is supplied to customers quarterly as a full tile resupply in January, April, July, and October, incorporating any updates made by the revision programme.