Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL)

Guidance last updated: 20 October 2026

GDAL is a library used by many Geographic Information Systems (GIS) packages for converting between many different raster and vector GIS data formats. It also includes command-line utilities for data translation and processing. It is released under an X/MIT style Open Source licence by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation.

Usage

After connecting to Stanage (see Establishing a SSH connection), start an interactive session:

salloc

Load by running one of the following:

module load GDAL/3.11.3-foss-2025b
module load GDAL/3.11.3-intel-2025b
module load GDAL/3.6.2-foss-2022b

This will:

  • add several GDAL programs to your PATH environment variable

  • allow other programs to make use of (dynamically link against) the GDAL library

  • load the matching compiler/toolchain and library dependencies

The examples below use GDAL/3.11.3-intel-2025b. Loading this module also loads the matching Intel toolchain and Python dependencies. Check the version:

module load GDAL/3.11.3-intel-2025b
gdal-config --version

The expected version is 3.11.3. Some commonly used programs are:

  • gdalinfo: inspect raster metadata

  • gdal_translate: convert raster formats or extract a subset

  • gdalwarp: reproject or resample rasters

  • gdalbuildvrt: build a virtual raster from input datasets

  • gdaladdo: create raster overviews

  • ogrinfo: inspect vector datasets

  • ogr2ogr: convert or reproject vector datasets

List the raster and vector formats supported by the installed build with:

gdalinfo --formats
ogrinfo --formats

Raster examples

For a georeferenced raster named input.tif, inspect its metadata and create an LZW-compressed GeoTIFF copy:

gdalinfo input.tif
gdal_translate -of GTiff -co COMPRESS=LZW input.tif compressed.tif

To reproject it to Web Mercator (EPSG:3857), using nearest-neighbour resampling:

gdalwarp -t_srs EPSG:3857 -r near input.tif projected.tif

Choose a target coordinate system and resampling method appropriate for your data.

Vector examples

For a GeoJSON dataset named points.geojson, inspect its layers and convert it to a GeoPackage:

ogrinfo -al -so points.geojson
ogr2ogr -f GPKG points.gpkg points.geojson

Batch submission

The following example batch submission script inspects and compresses input.tif. Submit it from the directory containing that input file.

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --ntasks=1
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=1
#SBATCH --mem-per-cpu=2000
#SBATCH --time=00:05:00

set -e
export SLURM_EXPORT_ENV=ALL
module load GDAL/3.11.3-intel-2025b

srun gdalinfo input.tif
srun gdal_translate -of GTiff -co COMPRESS=LZW input.tif compressed.tif

Save as gdal.slurm and submit with:

sbatch gdal.slurm

Documentation

Documentation is available on the project site.

Installation notes

GDAL was installed using Easybuild, build details can be found in $EBROOTGDAL/easybuild with a given module loaded.

Direct dependencies for latest version of GDAL