High res elevation data

General talk
1

Good day and apologies is this is a stupid question but I’m quite new to mapping and have not read much of the documentation yet.
I was only hoping that someone could point me in the right direction with a task I have to perform.

I’m trying to build a model for predicting vehicle fuel consumption using elevation change (road grade) as one of several inputs. But the GPS crumb trail data I have is too sparse…

Setup:
Basically I have GPS crumb trail data for vehicles, divided into “trips”. I would like to find the detailed (as detailed as possible) elevation profile of the route that the vehicle traveled, based on the GPS crumb trail, but the GPS data has several km between points which means I miss much of the road undulation.

Is there a way to “fill in” GPS data from OSM using tools that you could advise?
Also is OSM elevation data accurate when compared with Google Maps for example? In one manual attempt I used www.gpsvisualizer.com for one trip which seemed to return good results.

I suspect I need to, for each trip:

  1. Convert GPS crumb trail to a Route
  2. Extract the Route profile from OSM which will hopefully result in much higher resolution crumb trail
  3. Fill in even more (extra) GPS points to achieve highest resolution available
    but maybe there’s an easier way?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

2

Hi BitterPeg.

OSM doesn’t try to be a source of elevation data. (There is an optional “ele” tag mappers can assign to nodes, but I doubt it’s widespread enough to be useful for you.)

When someone creates a topo-contour map using OSM data, eg OpenCycleMap, they get the elevation data from a different source and “mash it up” with the OSM data, with good results.

You can find more info, including elevation data downloads, at http://viewfinderpanoramas.org/dem3.html

Best of luck. :slight_smile:

3

A popular source is SRTM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Radar_Topography_Mission