Elevation-Derived Hydrography Data Acquisition Specifications: Raster Spatial Reference Requirements

To generate a properly formatted spatial reference, the USGS recommends adding spatial reference information into the GeoTIFF or GeoTIFF (COG) after completing all other processing using a GDAL version greater than 3.1.0.

While the USGS recognizes that the GDAL tool is not a rigorous standards-based solution, it serves as a mutually convenient open-source tool suitable for 3DHP purposes at this time.

Following are examples to improve readability of the spatial reference including other commercial software standard GeoTIFF file generation:

gdal_translate -a_srs EPSG:6350+5703 -co TILED=YES -co BIGTIFF=IF_SAFER -co COMPRESS=DEFLATE -co GEOTIFF_KEYS_FLAVOR=ESRI_PE <source_dataset> <destination_dataset>

for generation of a COG formatted GeoTIFF file:

gdal_translate -a_srs EPSG:6350+5703 -of COG -co BIGTIFF=IF_SAFER -co COMPRESS=DEFLATE -co GEOTIFF_KEYS_FLAVOR=ESRI_PE <source_dataset> <destination_dataset>