Temperature programmed hydrogen desorption (H2-TPD) is a versatile tool to characterize metal surfaces in heterogeneous catalysts. We present a systematic H2-TPD study combined with a kinetic analysis of the H2 desorption process from pure polycrystalline copper and alumina supported copper. The results show that, in contrast to typical Cu/ZnO based methanol synthesis catalysts, the alumina support has no measureable influence on the desorption process and that the copper surface in both catalyst can be accurately described by a theoretically deduced mixture of the low index planes Cu(100), Cu(110), and Cu(111).Graphical Abstract