The Bright Earth eAtlas Basemap dataset collection is a satellite-derived global map of the world at a 1:1M scale for most of the world and 1:200k scale for Australia. This map was inspired by Natural Earth II (NEII) and NASA's Blue Marble Next Generation (BMNG) imagery.

Its aim was to provide a basemap similar to NEII but with a higher resolution (~10x).

This basemap is derived from the following datasets: Blue Marble Next Generation 2004-04 (NASA), VMap0 coastline, Coast100k 2004 Australian coastline (GeoScience Australia), SRTM30 Plus v8.0 (UCSD) hillshading, Natural Earth Vector 10m bathymetry and coastline v2.0 (NE), gbr100 hillshading (JCU).

This dataset (World_Bright-Earth-e-Atlas-basemap) contains all the files required to setup the Bright Earth eAtlas basemap in a GeoServer. All the data files are stored in GeoTiffs or shapefiles and so can also be loaded into ArcMap, however no styling has been included for this purpose.

This basemap is small enough (~900 MB) that can be readily used locally or deployed to a GeoServer.

Base map aesthetics (added 28 Jan 2025)

The Bright Earth e-Atlas Basemap is a high-resolution representation of the Earth's surface, designed to depict global geography with clarity, natural aesthetics with bright and soft color tones that enhance data overlays without overwhelming the viewer. The land areas are based on NASA's Blue Marble imagery, with modifications to lighten the tone and apply noise reduction filtering to soften the overall coloring. The original Blue Marble imagery was based on composite satellite imagery resulting in a visually appealing and clean map that highlights natural features while maintaining clarity and readability. Hillshading has been applied across the landmasses to enhance detail and texture, bringing out the relief of mountainous regions, plateaus, and other landforms.

The oceans feature three distinct depth bands to illustrate shallow continental areas, deeper open ocean zones, and the very deep trenches and basins. The colors transition from light blue in shallow areas to darker shades in deeper regions, giving a clear sense of bathymetric variation. Hillshading has also been applied to the oceans to highlight finer structures on the seafloor, such as ridges, trenches, and other geological features, adding depth and dimensionality to the depiction of underwater topography.

At higher zoom levels prominent cities are shown and the large scale roads are shown for Australia.

Rendered Raster Version (added 28 Jan 2025)

A low resolution version of the dataset is available as a raster file (PNG, JPG and GeoTiff) at ~2 km and 4 km resolutions. These rasters are useful for applications where GeoServer is not available to render the data dynamically. While the rasters are large they represent a small fraction of the full detail of the dataset. The rastered version was produced using the layout manager in QGIS to render maps of the whole world, pulling the imagery from the eAtlas GeoServer. This imagery from converted to the various formats using GDAL. More detail is provided in 'Rendered-bright-earth-processing.txt' in the download and browse section.

Change Log

2025-01-28: Added two rendered raster versions of the dataset at 21600x10800 and 10400x5400 pixels in size in PNG, JPG and GeoTiff format. Added