The new dataset 1984-2024 is available to download

License

All data here is produced under the Copernicus Programme and is provided free of charge, without restriction of use. For the full license information see the Copernicus Regulation.

Publications, models and data products that make use of these datasets must include proper acknowledgement, including citing datasets and the journal article as in the following citation.

Citation

Jean-Francois Pekel, Andrew Cottam, Noel Gorelick, Alan S. Belward, High-resolution mapping of global surface water and its long-term changes. Nature 540, 418-422 (2016). (doi:10.1038/nature20584)

If you are using the data as a layer in a published map, please include the following attribution text: 'Source: EC JRC/Google'

Data Users Guide

For a description of all of the datasets and details on how to use the data please see the Data Users Guide.

Data Update Notes (1984–2024)

We have updated the Global Surface Water Explorer dataset to include recent years. Please note the following key details regarding this new release:

• Collection 2 Transition: To extend our previous dataset (which ended in 2021), we transitioned to Landsat Collection 2. Collection 2 improves the absolute geolocation accuracy of the Landsat archive relative to Collection 1, principally through re-baselining the ground control library to the Sentinel-2 Global Reference Image. Combining scenes from the two collections therefore introduces a residual co-registration offset between them. The magnitude of this offset is spatially variable, reflecting the regionally uneven improvement of the ground control: it is typically sub-pixel but can reach or exceed one 30 m pixel in certain WRS-2 path/rows, while remaining negligible where the Collection 1 control was already accurate (Crawford et al., 2023).
  A complete backprocessing to ensure full consistency of the archive is planned.
  
• Layer Coverage & Merging: Long-term summary products—such as Occurrence, Recurrence, and Transitions—synthesize the entire time series from 1984 to 2024. However, the Seasonality, Monthly History, and Yearly History assets only cover the 2022–2024 period. To get the complete historical timeline for these specific assets, you will need to merge them with our previous historical assets (e.g., Version 1.4).
• Seasonality Improvements: We have entirely recomputed the Seasonality layers from 2016 to 2021 (still based on Landsat Collection 1) to correct a known issue that occasionally overestimated seasonal surface water. Meanwhile, the 2022–2024 Seasonality layers have been computed using the updated Landsat Collection 2.
• Occurrence Improvements: In versions 1.2 to 1.4, the years added after the original release (v1.0) were not processed in a way fully consistent with the original Occurrence calculation, which introduced errors. To restore consistency with the original dataset, the added years have been reprocessed against the v1.0 baseline. The corrected Occurrence layer is provided in GSW v1.5, computed on Landsat Collection 1 from 1984 to 2021 and on Collection 2 thereafter.
• Monthly Recurrence: An issue has been identified in the Monthly Recurrence in v1.4 (2021) and v1.5 (2024) layer, which can lower the long-term monthly values where observations are sparse. The correction has not yet been carried out and is foreseen.

Delivery Mechanisms

All of the datasets that comprise the Global Surface Water 1984-2021 and the recent 2022-2024 are being made freely available using the following delivery mechanisms: Global Surface Water Explorer, Data Download, Google Earth Engine and Web Map Services. These are described in the following sections.

Global Surface Water Explorer

The Global Surface Water Explorer is a simple web-mapping tool that shows all of the water datasets and allows users to navigate the globe visualizing the water datasets without installing any software. It also allows users to view the complete history of water detections over the 37-year period by clicking on the map. The tool is intended as a data viewer and does not provide any analytical features - if you would like to do your own analysis on the data then access the data using Data Download or Google Earth Engine. Explore the map.

Data Download

Currently all of the mapped datasets are available to download (i.e. occurrence, change, seasonality, recurrence, transitions and maximum extent).

Download process

Individual 10°x10° files

The Global Surface Water data are available to download in tiles 10°x10° from the map shown below. Click on the tile to show a list of the available datasets. Each one of these datasets is a hyperlink to the *.tif file.

Full dataset up to 2021

The full global surface water datasets can be downloaded by using this Python 2 script or using this Python 3 script . The zip file contains the Python script and a set of instructions for using it.
An handy alternative way to download this data is to use the following script wrote by Petr Tsymbarovich, available at this GitHub link.

FTP Download up to 2021

It is possible to download all the Global Surface Water Datasets up to 2021 via FTP using the Filezilla Client . Once downloaded and installed Filezilla, write in the Host field the link jeodpp.jrc.ec.europa.eu and then browse to GSWE folder to get all the Global Surface Water Explorer data. Alternatively, it is possible to get the data using the link https://jeodpp.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ftp/jrc-opendata/GSWE/

Supporting files

Symbology

Each of the downloadable files contains a colormap which will display the files in desktop GIS tools (such as QGIS or ArcGIS) using the symbology that has been used in the Global Surface Water Explorer. However, these colormaps do not contain the labels for the values. These can be added to the files by using the following symbology files. For instructions on how to use these files see the 'Using Symbology Files' section of the Data Users Guide.

There are also symbology files where the above palettes are unsuitable for users with deuteranopia colour-blindness:

There are no symbology files for the monthly or the yearly water history as files are encoded and must be decoded before they can be mapped.

Metadata

The downloadable files do not contain any metadata information and so it is provided here for each of the datasets. You may need to right click and Download Linked file.

Google Earth Engine

The 2021 data are available in the Google Earth Engine data catalog

Tutorials for using the Global Surface Water Dataset in Google Earth Engine are available here.

Asset ids

The data can also be accessed and used in the Google Earth Engine platform - for more information see here.
The 1984-2015 asset (green) is the version of record of the 2016 Nature publication (Pekel et al., 2016). : the exact validated dataset on which the published analysis is based. It is retained unchanged so that the published results remain reproducible.
The subsequent updates (yellow) extend the record beyond 2015. They were produced with equivalent care but were not subjected to the validation applied to the original dataset. They may therefore contain artefacts, in particular co-registration differences introduced by the change in ground control between Landsat Collection 1 and Collection 2.
The following asset ids are used in Google Earth Engine:

The new 2024 data are available as Google Earth Engine assets
We have entirely recomputed the Seasonality layers from 2016 to 2021 (still based on Landsat Collection 1) to correct a known issue that occasionally overestimated seasonal surface water.

New assets are available for the extended period 2022-2024 derived from Landsat Collection 2 (Landsat 8-9):
Aggregated products (e.g. Occurrence, Recurrence, Transitions etc.) cover the entire period 1984-2024 merging the two Landsat collections.

* : soon available

Hereafter and example of how to merge the YearlyHistory v1.4 and 1.5 to obtain a single collection containing data from 1984 to 2024:
var YearlyHistory84_24 = ee.ImageCollection('JRC/GSW1_4/YearlyHistory').merge(ee.ImageCollection('projects/global-surface-water/assets/GSW1_5/YearlyHistory').map(function(image) {return image.select([0], ['waterClass'])}));

Web Map Services

The Global Surface Water data can also be used within other websites or GIS clients by using what are called 'Web Map Services'. These services provide a direct link to the cached images that are used in the Global Surface Water Explorer and are the best option if you simply want to map the data and produce cartographic products. They are not suitable for analysis as the data are represented only as RGB images.

Desktop GIS

• In ArcGIS for Desktop:
• In the ArcCatalog Window, click on GIS Servers and then double click on Add WMTS Servers
• In the URL box, enter: https://storage.googleapis.com/water-world/downloads_ancillary/WMTS_Global_Surface_WaterV2024.xml and click OK (replace with 2021 to access the previous version)
• Expand the 'Global Surface Water on storage.googleapis.com' item and drag any of the layers onto the map

• In QGIS:
• In the Manage Layers toolbar, click on Add WMS/WMTS Layer
• Click New and enter a name(Global Surface Water) and URL https://storage.googleapis.com/water-world/downloads_ancillary/WMTS_Global_Surface_WaterV2024.xml (replace with 2021 to access the previous version)
• Click OK and click Connect - select a layer to add to the map

Websites

The Web Map Services can also be used within websites using any Javascript Mapping API that supports tiled layer types. The examples below show you how to create and add the transitions layer in Leaflet v1.0 and then ArcGIS Javascript API v3.18. The layer type can be one of: transitions, occurrence, change, seasonality, recurrence or extent.

Web Map Services for version 1.4 referring to year 2021 are accessible at the following link by replacing the placehoder __LAYER__ with the desired layer type
- https://storage.googleapis.com/global-surface-water/tiles2021/__LAYER__/{z}/{x}/{y}.png

    var transitions = new L.tileLayer(https://storage.googleapis.com/water-world/tiles2024/transitions/{z}/{x}/{y}.png",
    { format: "image/png",
      maxZoom: 13,
      errorTileUrl : "https://storage.googleapis.com/global-surface-water/downloads_ancillary/blank.png",
      attribution: "2016 EC JRC/Google" });
    map.addLayer(transitions);
    

    var transitions = new WebTiledLayer("https://storage.googleapis.com/water-world/tiles2024/transitions/{level}/{col}/{row}.png",
    { "copyright" : '2016 EC JRC/Google' });
    map.addLayer(transitions);
    

ArcGIS Online

The Web Map Services for the year 2020 are available in the ESRI ArcGIS Online platform as a set of WMTS layers. To see a list of the datasets, search for 'GSW'.

Contact

If you have any feedback on the Global Surface Water data please contact: jrc-surfacewater@ec.europa.eu