USGS has been moving towards serving data through The National Map Viewer. They have several WMServices through their website that serve elevation data to the public (hillshade & DEM). The problem is that geoprocessing tools in ArcToolbox won't accept these layers as inputs.
Where can I download (free) DEM gis data that I can use in analysis? I'm specifically interested in the 1/3 arc second (~10m) or the 1 arc second (~30m) data.
Currently I'm going through the USGS NED Tile download tool, which has ~4 files per county. My areas of interest cover about 50 counties — I don't see myself manually downloading these files one by one.
Best Answer
You can download NED data for entire counties and also entire states (though I've never needed an entire state) using the National Map Viewer, click the "Download Data" button in the upper-right, then choose Counties or States as your reference area, click the county/state you're interested in, and a list of (usually just one) search result pops up on the left. Click the "Download" link (lower-left of the search result text) and you'll see a list of available data sets, just check "Elevation", choose your format, and click "Next". The site will email you a link, since all the county and state NED data is pre-packaged into zip files you should get a download link pretty quickly.