Product supply

Supply format

OS Terrain 50 is available as:

• A 50m grid in ASCII grid and GML 3.2.1 (Simple Features Profile – level 0).

• 10m contours in Esri shapefile, GML 3.2.1 (Simple Features Profile – level 0), GeoPackage and vector tiles (MBTiles).

Supply mechanism

OS Terrain 50 is supplied as an online download, which is available with no registration required. Data can be downloaded in various formats from the Ordnance Survey Data Hub.

For the ASCII, GML and Esri shapefile formats, the data is provided as a full set of Great Britain in tiles. The national dataset is supplied as 10km-by-10km tiles of data. There are 2,858 tiles in the product which are arranged into 55 folders, with each folder representing a 100km tile grid square.

The GeoPackage and vector tile data formats are provided as a single national set within one flat file.

The product will be supplied separately for grid or contour as compressed folders for each geographic tile of data. Each compressed folder will contain data plus several additional files.

It is recommended that a download manager is used to extract the tiled data as this additional functionality will 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.

This data is designed to be kept up to date by annual full tile resupply.

Coverage and file sizes

OS Terrain 50 gives full national coverage of Great Britain. The data is derived from the same source data as our large-scale revision programme that updates OS MasterMap Topography Layer.

Data will be compressed using the zip compression method and is not encrypted. Compression rates vary for contour tiles and depend upon the number of features in the geographic location.

A full national supply of OS Terrain 50 grid tiles is 157 Mb compressed.

Product update schedule

OS Terrain 50 is supplied to customers annually each July, incorporating any updates made by the revision programme.