[
last edited 30. April 2011]
See also
here for the New Zealand geo data "in action".
Topographic Maps 1:50,000Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) used to operate a WMS. However, this is finally gone for good. Fortunately, they started to offer the 1:50k (and 1:250k) topographic maps as a GeoTIFF download:
LINZ topo mapsDownloads are quite big, 138 MB for a 1:50k sheet. Depending on your internet connection this will take a while.
TransDEM can read the GeoTIFF tags (since version 2.1.0.1), meaning georeferencing will be automatic.
Some maps sheets are marked version 2. For those you will need TransDEM 2.1.3.1.
Vector DataLINZ also offers vector data. The download links are available from the Topo50 pages, same as for GeoTIFF raster above, near the bottom of the page.
TransDEM can read the data in ESRI Shape file format. Set the coordinate system to "New Zealand Transverse Mercator" (NZTM), before opening such a file.
The railway layer is named "railway_cl".
25m DEMsAnother New Zealand site, the
Landcare Research LRIS portal, has made the 25m DEMs available for free. You will need to register to download the data.
NZDEM North/South Island 25 metreThe portal works similarly to the USGS Seamless Server, i.e. you mark the area you wish to obtain by a mask, and the server generates your individual data package.
Select "New Zealand Transverse Mercator" (NZTM) projection and "ASCII" Grid format. (Other projections which TransDEM recognises, may work as well.)
Vertical precision is floating point which is good for accuracy.