NOAA’s Great Lakes bathymetry is a surveyed grid covering all five Great Lakes and Lake St. Clair, detailed enough for a whole-lake relief or a close-up of one bay.
Each lake name below opens the studio framed to that lake’s survey area and generates its terrain. You can also search every surveyed lake or browse other regions.
Lakes with surveyed depth data
- Lake Erie
- Lake Huron
- Lake Michigan
- Lake Ontario
- Lake St. Clair
- Lake Superior Draft NOAA grid.
Make a lake map from this data
- Open a lake from the list. The studio frames its survey area, turns on Water depth and generates the terrain. Widen the frame and regenerate if you want more shoreline.
- Check the warnings above the preview. The studio warns when survey coverage is partial or depths are estimated; how lake depths work explains why.
- Enter your sheet thickness in Terrain layers; the studio works out the layer count. If a deep lake needs more sheets than you want, Fit depth compresses it while keeping the shoreline. The custom lake map guide walks through the whole build.
- Turn on paint templates to spray only the water on each layer, and split the map if it is bigger than your laser bed.
- Export the SVG layers. The download’s ATTRIBUTION.txt credits the survey used.
Data source
- NOAA NCEI Great Lakes Bathymetry: surveyed grid. Public domain; acknowledge source.
Survey dates and water levels vary between lakes, and a listing can cover only part of a lake. See sources and attribution for credits.