The new EU-Hydro 2.0 production: A Copernicus high-resolution hydrography dataset across Europe based on latest generation elevation and ancillary data

The new EU-Hydro 2.0 production is tackling the requirements of a modern hydrographic reference product within the pan-European hydrological domain, uniting the requirements of both the hydrographic mapping and the hydrological monitoring communities. The EU-Hydro 2.0 dataset is part of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) portfolio, implemented by the European Environment Agency (EEA). The current EU-Hydro v1.3 dataset offers detailed information on the geographical distribution and spatial characteristics of water resources throughout Europe, such as river networks, surface water bodies and watersheds. However, its use for hydrological modelling remained limited due to shortcomings in data structure, resolution, and quality. The new version of EU-Hydro (EU-Hydro 2.0) builds on new, advanced hydrological conditioning algorithms that improve hydrological representation and consistency of current methods. As a result, it supports various use cases beyond mapping, including hydrological modelling and prediction as well as environmental assessments related to river connectivity and the evaluation of anthropogenic impacts, all with the goal to strengthen water resilience across Europe.

The EU-Hydro 2.0 production is underway and planned to be made available towards the end of 2026. It builds upon a latest generation Digital Elevation Model (DEM): the Copernicus DEM, a pan-European DEM available at 10m resolution, based on the TanDEM-X mission, supported by the Copernicus DEM at 30m resolution for catchments that flow in and out of the EEA38+UK area. The production of EU-Hydro 2.0 involves best-suitable and most recent ancillary data of hydrography, land cover, and infrastructure, as well as VHR satellite data for quality control, editing (e.g., river corrections, coastline mapping) and validation. The product suite consists of eight main layers: The three main raster products are the hydrologically conditioned DEM (Hydro-DEM), the flow direction (Hydro-DIR) and the flow accumulation (Hydro-ACC) products, supported by additional raster layers for expert hydrological use. The five vector products are the river network (Hydro-NET), water bodies (Hydro-WBO), basins and sub-watersheds (Hydro-BAS), a product on artificial hydrographic structures (Hydro-ART) and a coastline (Hydro-COAST). In addition, a cartographically enhanced river product in focus regions (Carto-NET) is being produced. All layers are interrelated, scalable and logically consistent.

A ramp-up phase was carried out between 2024-2025 in six test sites of different hydrological and terrain characteristics (full Po catchment, N-Sweden, S-Spain, Slovenia/Croatia, Central Türkiye, and boundary area Romania/Moldova). An independent validation of the different layers in the test sites, considering geometry, topology, attribution and complex interrelations between different layers was performed, in order to evaluate fitness for potential mapping and modelling use cases. The validation utilized national/regional reference data and very high resolution (VHR) image interpretation and concluded that every layer is generally performing well, with some layers exceeding expectations whereas for other layers some issues on harmonization remain to be addressed. The approach aims at transparency and automation to the extent possible, supported by manual corrections where needed to increase quality and meet user requirements. By applying efficient and reproducible data processing, further updates of EU-Hydro into the future can be facilitated.