13

I have a polyline in Google Earth.

I am able to see the elevation profile in Google Earth when I move along the polyline but is there a way to extract the lat,long and elevation data out to Excel?

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  • 5
    My first thought is that depending on your intended use, this may violate the Google Terms of Service, as a derivative work. My second thought would be that it would be simpler to bring your polyline into ArcGIS, load in a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) from USGS, at The National Map and extract your elevations directly than doing a multi-step process out of GE. – Get Spatial Jun 25 '12 at 21:30
11

The GEOCONTEXT-PROFILER will create an elevation profile just like Google Earth and you can import a KML and export a CSV. It should give you the same results as Google Earth.

This is the license restriction page that the tool links to.

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4

The Google Elevation API can give you the elevation at any point on earth, so you can iterate across your polyline and get the elevation of each point:

https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/elevation/json?locations=39.7391536,-104.9847034|36.455556,-116.866667 :

{
   "results" : [
      {
         "elevation" : 1608.637939453125,
         "location" : {
            "lat" : 39.7391536,
            "lng" : -104.9847034
         },
         "resolution" : 4.771975994110107
      },
      {
         "elevation" : -50.78903579711914,
         "location" : {
            "lat" : 36.455556,
            "lng" : -116.866667
         },
         "resolution" : 19.08790397644043
      }
   ],
   "status" : "OK"
}

Up to 2,500 requests per day are available for free. Note that the terms of service require you to display any obtained results on a Google map, and calling the API from Excel or ArcGIS is likely to be a little complicated.

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protected by Aaron♦ Jun 24 '15 at 15:34

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