Getting elevation at particular coordinate (lat/lon) programmatically (but offline)?

Question

I would prefer something in python (but I would settle for any programming language) and something that I could install on my own server so the only limitations would be hardware (no throttling, no daily request limits, etc). i.e. I'm not interested in using a hosted service like Google Maps API.

What I want to be able to do is something like:

for location in locations_data_store:
  location.elevation = some_module.lookup_elevation(location.lat, location.lon)
  location.persist()

Or, it could be more involved than that. I don't mind making a REST API request, parsing some JSON, or in some other way more complex programmatically.

Answer 1

You can use the rasterio library:

import rasterio

coords = ((147.363,-36.419), (147.361,-36.430))
elevation = 'srtm_66_20.tif'

with rasterio.open(elevation) as src:
    vals = src.sample(coords)
    for val in vals:
        print(val[0]) #val is an array of values, 1 element 
                      #per band. src is a single band raster 
                      #so we only need val[0]

The example above uses the SRTM digital elevation model (DEM), but there are others available depending on your area of interest and resolution requirements.

Note the example is simple as SRTM data is available in a geographic coordinate system, there are a few more steps if your DEM is in a different projection.

Answer 2

For the future users' convinience, when you provide lat lon in get_elevation function, it gives the elevation.

import rasterio
elevation_file = 'Dem.tif'
def get_elevation(lat, lon):
    coords = ((lat,lon), (lat,lon))
    with rasterio.open(elevation_file) as src:
        vals = src.sample(coords)
        for val in vals:
            elevation=val[0]
            return elevation
get_elevation(34, 36)