Maps with accurate elevations. Determining the height of a point above sea level

The other day I was asked about the altitude at which the Crimean cities of Yalta, Alushta and Simferopol are located. At first I wanted to dismiss this question, but curiosity prompted me to check what the Internet writes on this topic. It turned out that it is almost impossible to find references to the height of most cities on the web. former Union. Struck by this fact, I decided to correct the situation.

To begin with, I climbed into Wikipedia and made inquiries about what the height above sea level is and from which sea it should be considered. Here is what they write there:
Height above sea level- a coordinate in three-dimensional space (the other two are latitude and longitude), showing at what level, relative to the sea level taken as zero, this or that object is located.
Baltic height system(BSV) - the system adopted in the USSR in 1977 absolute heights, which are counted from zero footstock in Kronstadt. From this mark, the heights of reference geodetic points are counted, which are marked on the ground with various geodetic signs and plotted on maps. At present, the BSV is used in Russia and a number of other CIS countries.

In theory, everything is clear - you need to take a detailed topographic map and see what heights are indicated there. But where did she get this card?
The first thing that came to mind was to look into OziExplorer. This is a special program for working with GPS (satellite navigator). One of its functions allows you to determine the height simply by pointing the cursor at a place on the map. With her help, I easily found out that Alushta is located at altitudes from 0 to 130 meters above sea level. Yalta - from 0 to 200 meters, Sevastopol - from 0 to 100, Simferopol - an average of 250 meters above sea level.

However, this method is not very versatile. After all, the question still remains "where to get a map?", this time digitized. I had maps of Crimea, but it didn’t work out with the rest of the world ...

The answer literally lay on the surface, that is, on the Internet. It's not the first year that the service has been operating there. Google Earth - a kind of digital globe glued together from photographs earth's surface from a "cosmic" height. There must be a function for determining the height. I downloaded the distribution of Google Earth (free version), installed it and started exploring the menu. There were no altimeters. Strange ... Maybe you need to read the help? Didn't find it either :(
Already almost desperate, I suddenly noticed numbers running fast at the bottom of the screen. Eureka!!! This was the altimeter.

To celebrate, I began to run around the map and measure the height of all the cities in a row.

The height of Yekaterinburg above sea level is 250 meters.
The height of Moscow above sea level is 130 meters.
Saratov - 40
Makhachkala - 15
Krasnoyarsk - 140
perm - 150
Chelyabinsk - 250
Ufa - 125
Kazan - 90
Nizhny Novgorod - 70
Ivanovo - 130
Yaroslavl - 98
Voronezh - 104
Petersburg - 13
Arkhangelsk - 7
Novgorod - 28
Murom - 105

Altitude above sea level of some cities of Ukraine:
The height of Kyiv above sea level is from 90 (the level of the Dnieper) to 190 (the famous Dnieper steeps) meters.
Kharkiv - 122
Chernivtsi - 240
Khmelnitsky - 299
Ternopil - 336
Vinnitsa - 294
Cherkasy - 80
Krivoy Rog - 85
Zaporozhye - 75
Kherson - 50
Donetsk - 241
Dnepropetrovsk - 68
Sumy - 125
Poltava - 150
Chernihiv - 117

In the western part of Ukraine, I was interested in the heights of such settlements:
Lviv - 270
Ivano-Frankivsk - 343
Uzhgorod - 187
Mukachevo - 181
Rakhiv - 430
Yasinya - 650
Yablonitsky pass - 930

I hope you understand that all the data received is not too accurate. Google Earth is not a professional tool with guaranteed accuracy and reliably known errors. She has very different goals.
In addition, the very term "height of the city above sea level" is very conditional. After all, the city is not a point, but a huge object, different areas of which have different heights.

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Konstantin Konovalov:

For a long time I wanted to make a convenient map of the heights of Moscow, so that I can comfortably ride a bike in unfamiliar parts of the city. And to make it easier for friends who are starting to use a bicycle as a transport to explain how best to build a route. Not many realize that for a cyclist, elevation changes are more important than the shortest path. In this post, I will talk a little about height maps and how Red Square should be changed so that the city becomes convenient for people.

OpenStreetMap with elevation data

I tried to work with different uploads of height data from different map services. But these data were not accurate enough and the horizontal spacing was too large, and not accurate, not giving an idea of ​​sharp ups and downs, such as Rozhdestvensky Boulevard.

This summer, the idea came that it makes sense to look for data not in modern web services, but in old city maps. Before the revolution, the quality of the cards was quite high. And yet there was no traffic. People rolled carriages, carts and horse-drawn carriages themselves or with the help of horses. This means that the issue of elevation difference in such a hilly city as Moscow was very acute. I quickly found a map from 1888 accurately describing the topography of the capital.

The plan of Moscow was drawn up on the basis of a trigonometric network for surveying and leveling the city in 1874-77 by N.N. Smirnov and D.P. Rashkov (2nd edition of the Moscow City Duma, 1888)

Someone will say that this is an old map, a lot has changed. On the one hand, yes, the city is no longer recognizable, but the heights have practically not changed, of course, bridges across the Moscow River have moved somewhere, and therefore the relief in these places has been slightly corrected, but in fact there have been no major changes in the relief for a half century did not happen. And this is my coolest discovery in this project.

One summer day, I sat under a tree in the Hermitage Garden and redrawn the heights on my laptop. old map. And then squeezed into 3D model relief of the city.

3D model of Moscow heights

Seven Hills of Moscow

Lighter areas are peaks, dark areas are lows. Frequent ladder of contour lines - sharp drops heights. This visualization helped me quickly figure out some parts of the city myself and distinguish the main hills and ways to bike up them with minimal effort.

Speaking of hills. Until now, many people like to repeat that Moscow is a city on seven hills, but few people know where these hills are.

In fact, this is not true, somewhere from the 16th century they began to mention seven hills, and even then only to emphasize the connection between Moscow and Rome. I marked on the map the places where these hills are located. It is easy to see that most of them are just parts of larger hills.

Seven Hills of Moscow

I am personally interested that in fact, at the highest points of the main hills inside the Garden Ring, there are two architectural monuments. The highest point is inner side Sretensky Boulevard, in this place are the buildings of the Rossiya insurance company, famous not only for their architecture and residents, but for the fact that the building was built as an autonomous building with its own power plant in the basement, a prototype air conditioner, heating, and even with an artesian well 45 meters deep. And at the same time, they chose the most high point. Maybe in case of complete flooding of the entire city? Don't know. But an interesting coincidence. And on the second highest hill is Sytin's office building, which survived the invasion of Napoleon, and in 1979 was even moved 33 meters to the side.

Detour of the hills

But back to the original bike theme. A height map is needed for building a route and for designing cycling infrastructure. How to build a route on a height map is not difficult to figure out. Let's take, for example, one of the most unpleasant sections of the Boulevard Ring cycle path - Rozhdestvensky Boulevard. It is one of the most visible hills in the city center. Those who constantly ride a bicycle know that it is better to stay away and immediately think over the route outside this section, although there is a bike path on Rozhdestvensky Boulevard.

The red dotted line is a sharp rise, the white lines are bike lanes, the yellow lines are detour lines.

In order not to have to drive into a too sharp mountain, alternative routes can be laid (route 1 or route 2 in the picture), which will have a more even distribution of elevation changes along their length, which will reduce physical exertion.

The white line is the route along the boulevards, the yellow line is the alternative route. The map is oriented to the west.

Height maps can help you get around a small area, or they can suggest alternative routes passing many kilometers of hills. For example, if you are on Kropotkinskaya (point A), and you need to get to Trubnaya (point B), then the most logical route that comes to mind is a trip along the boulevard ring, and there is also a bike lane in places, it seems that the decision is not bad, but in fact there is a more relaxed version of the movement. You can go along the mouth of the Neglinka River, which is now flowing in a pipe, and thus bypass the hill. Moving along the boulevard will lead you to the top of one of the highest hills in Moscow, to Pushkinskaya Square. So most the path will have to go up, which is not the most the best solution. Yes, and on the way you will have to drag the bike through the underpass under Novy Arbat.

Bicycle infrastructure design

Per last years The Moscow Mayor's Office has done a lot for the emergence of bicycle infrastructure in the city. This is a very good initiative towards an ecological and healthy city. But, unfortunately, there is back side. The city is building a lot of bike lanes, but they all appear in a chaotic manner, they are not connected to each other. That is, they do not form a single network with which you can get from point A to point B. When you ride a bike around the city, you may come across several bike paths along the way, but most of the time you will move along streets unsuitable for cycling.

According to City Hall reports, there are already more than 200 kilometers of bike paths in Moscow. And this is one of the main problems and misunderstandings between the city hall and cyclists. The mayor's office thinks that the more paths will be built, the more cycling the city will become, but in reality it is not so. People will not ride bike paths like in Amsterdam until these paths are connected to each other in a single, understandable network. Paths from nowhere to nowhere are not needed by anyone, except for people who write reports on kilometers of built paths in the city.

Moscow needs main bike paths, which should connect parts of the city with each other, be as straight as possible and converge in the center. And we also need secondary paths that will penetrate into the quarters and connect the trunk lines to each other, forming a single continuous network.

Map with main POIs

Let's go back to the height map. How can it help in the design and justification of the construction of bike paths? Let's take a look at the current state of the "network" of bike paths in the center of Moscow.

Active bike lanes

This is what the existing bike paths in the city look like. Yes, they help build some routes, but they go from nowhere to nowhere, and even up and down hills, and sometimes they are simply interrupted by parking. Therefore, there are not as many cyclists on them as we would like.

Therefore, people are not yet ready to transfer from a car or subway to a bicycle. In order for a bicycle to become a real transport alternative for many people, it is necessary to create a smart network of bike paths that will be interconnected and will also comfortably go around sharp elevations.

the Red Square

Now it is completely forbidden to ride a bicycle on Red Square, no one even knows the reason for this ban. But the police are constantly trying to stop cyclists there.

If you look closely at the height map, you can see that Red Square is the lowland of a hill, which can be well driven around to head towards Novokuznetskaya or Kotelnicheskaya embankment. But now it’s not that there is no infrastructure, there is just a ridiculous ban on the movement of bicycles and prohibition signs are hanging.

I would like to appeal to the mayor of the city, the FSO and the leadership transport complex with a proposal for the development of cycling. If a direct main bike path is laid from Tsvetnoy Boulevard to Dobryninskaya (through Red Square), it will connect the two parts of the city. Since the hefty bridges for cars (Bolshoy Kamenny, Bolshoy Moskvoretsky and Bolshoy Ustyinsky) were built in the 30s, instead of comfortable old bridges, the city has been torn into two parts, between which pedestrians can only move normally by metro. But if we start developing bicycle infrastructure and transfer bike paths between the two parts of the center of the capital, albeit along these road bridges, then bicycle and pedestrian traffic will increase.

Main bike path through the city center. Existing bike lanes are marked in white.

Highlighted in yellow is the first main bike path I propose through the center. Throughout its length, the elevation changes are insignificant, in any case, not much complicating the pedaling of the bicycle.

Half of this bike path already exists, you just need to connect the pieces of the existing paths together, as well as connect it to the embankments. Embankments are a very suitable place for bike paths, because there are no elevation changes and traffic is almost traffic-free. But they lack infrastructure and cyclists, developing great speed interfere with walking pedestrians. And also there are no ground crossings, which makes it difficult to move out to the embankments.

It only takes political will to implement such a cycle path. On the car traffic this bike path will have almost no effect. To the south, it can continue along Lyusinovskaya Street to Tulskaya, where there is already a one-way bike path, and to the north along Olimpiyskiy Prospekt to the Festival Park.

After the appearance of such a bike path, it would be logical for the new main paths to branch off to the west and east from the Kremlin Ring.

City for people

The city is primarily created for people, cars, of course, there is a place, but if everyone gets behind the wheel of a car, the city will rise. Yes, actually now he stands in traffic jams all day. So if at least 5% of Muscovites switch to a bicycle, it will become easier to breathe in the city, and traffic jams will decrease. I mostly ride my bike, which is faster than the bus, taxi, and for short distances faster than the subway. But not everyone will be able to drive on the roads in the extreme lane, now and then bumping into car boors. Therefore, the process of switching to a bicycle is still difficult for most citizens. The city does not need bike lanes, the city needs a well-connected network of bike lanes.

In the meantime, Moscow is sad and waiting for a crowd of cyclists.

In addition to the bicycle question, the height map answers why Malaya Bronnaya was flooded this summer. Yes, Moscow’s storm sewers are not in the best condition, but if you look at the height map, you will see that the flooded piece of Malaya Bronnaya, as well as the Patriarch’s Pond, are in a small depression and water tends to accumulate there. Therefore, the mayor's office should pay attention to storm sewers in such places in the first place.

I carried out this cartographic study on my own initiative this summer. I only disassembled central part cities, but I think a normal height map can be collected for the whole of Moscow. It only takes time.

How to determine the height of a city above sea level?

The other day I was asked, Kirill Yasko writes, about the altitude at which the Crimean cities of Yalta, Alushta and Simferopol are located. At first I wanted to dismiss this question, but curiosity prompted me to check what the Internet writes on this topic.

It turned out that it is almost impossible to find references to the height of most cities of the former Soviet Union on the net. Struck by this fact, I decided to correct the situation.

To begin with, I climbed into Wikipedia and made inquiries about what the height above sea level is and from which sea it should be considered. Here is what they write there:

Height above sea level- a coordinate in three-dimensional space (the other two are latitude and longitude), showing at what level, relative to the sea level taken as zero, this or that object is located.

Baltic height system(BSV) - the system of absolute heights adopted in the USSR in 1977, which is counted from zero footstock in Kronstadt. From this mark, the heights of reference geodetic points are counted, which are marked on the ground with various geodetic signs and plotted on maps. At present, the BSV is used in Russia and a number of other CIS countries.

In theory, everything is clear - you need to take a detailed topographic map and see what heights are indicated there. But where did she get this card?

The first thing that came to mind was to look into OziExplorer. This is a special program for working with GPS (satellite navigator). One of its functions allows you to determine the height simply by pointing the cursor at a place on the map. With her help, I easily found out that Alushta is located at altitudes from 0 to 130 meters above sea level. Yalta - from 0 to 200 meters, Sevastopol - from 0 to 100, Simferopol - an average of 250 meters above sea level.

However, this method is not very versatile. After all, the question still remains “where to get a map?”, This time digitized. I had maps of Crimea, but it didn’t work out with the rest of the world ...

The answer literally lay on the surface, that is, on the Internet. It's not the first year that the service has been operating there. Google Earth- a kind of digital globe, glued together from photographs of the earth's surface from a "space" height. There must be a function for determining the height. I downloaded the distribution of Google Earth (free version), installed it and started exploring the menu. There were no altimeters. Strange ... Maybe you need to read the help? Didn't find it either.

Already almost desperate, I suddenly noticed numbers running fast at the bottom of the screen. Eureka! This was the altimeter.

To celebrate, I began to run around the map and measure the height of all the cities in a row.

• The height of Yekaterinburg above sea level is 250 meters.
• The height of Moscow above sea level is 130 meters.
• Saratov - 40
• Makhachkala - 15
• Krasnoyarsk - 140
• Perm - 150
• Chelyabinsk - 250
• Ufa - 125
• Kazan - 90
• Nizhny Novgorod - 70
• Ivanovo - 130
• Yaroslavl - 98
• Voronezh - 104
• Petersburg - 13
• Arkhangelsk - 7
• Novgorod - 28
• Murom - 105

Altitude above sea level of some cities of Ukraine:

• The height of Kyiv above sea level is from 90 (the level of the Dnieper) to 190 (the famous Dnieper steeps) meters.
• Kharkiv - 122
• Chernivtsi - 240
• Khmelnitsky - 299
• Ternopil - 336
• Vinnitsa - 294
• Cherkasy - 80
• Krivoy Rog - 85
• Zaporozhye - 75
• Kherson - 50
• Donetsk - 241
• Dnepropetrovsk - 68
• Sumy - 125
• Poltava - 150
• Chernihiv - 117

In the western part of Ukraine, I was interested in the heights of such settlements:

• Lviv - 270
• Ivano-Frankivsk - 343
• Uzhgorod - 187
• Mukachevo - 181
• Rakhiv - 430
• Yasinya - 650
• Yablonitsky pass - 930

I hope you understand that all the data received is not too accurate. Google Earth is not a professional tool with guaranteed accuracy and reliably known errors. She has very different goals.

In addition, the very term "height of the city above sea level" is very conditional. After all, a city is not a point, but a huge object, different areas of which have different heights.

When in question about viewing Google maps, sometimes mention is made of the "map/terrain" mode, in which the unevenness of the land is highlighted by changing color tones. In this map mode, valleys and mountain ranges are clearly distinguished, with height levels plotted. But if you need to determine the height at a certain point from the picture on the map, or the height above sea level in the valley, this is quite difficult to do.

Therefore, we will use the auxiliary program for , which determines not only the geographical coordinates (longitude and latitude), but also the height above sea level. This map can be switched to "relief" mode, find the desired peak and determine its height.

With this online program, you can not only determine the height of mountain peaks. If you have never wondered how high above sea level the area you live in is, then you will be surprised by the results of your measurements on the map.

Like google map program Google Earth also able to determine the height of the area above sea level. In this program, the height is determined dynamically for the coordinates under the mouse pointer.

For information. You can determine the height above sea level using an aneroid barometer, which will show 760 millimeters of mercury at zero altitude at a temperature of 15 ° C. At an altitude of 500 meters above sea level, the barometer will show 720 mm, 1000 meters - 670 mm Hg and so on. Decreases with elevation above sea level Atmosphere pressure(the atmospheric pressure) by about 8 mm Hg. Art. for every 100 meters of ascent. And than more height, the lower the atmospheric pressure and the concentration of oxygen in the air. For example, at an altitude of 3500 m, the atmospheric pressure is 1.5 times less than at zero altitude, respectively, and less oxygen saturation of the air.

For some people, a height of 800 meters is already reflected in their well-being. Therefore, when planning a travel route on a map from a satellite, it is necessary to pay attention to the height of the terrain. On the other hand, there are many high mountain resorts located higher than 1500 meters above sea level.

The Google Earth image shows the location on the screen of the block for displaying current altitude information. In the program options, the 3D View/Units of Measurement block contains the choice of units of measurement meters/kilometers or feet/miles.

Of course, you can determine the height using an aneroid barometer, GPS navigator a, or simultaneously use both as two different devices or as two devices in one, for example, Samsung smartphone Galaxy Nexus, which has both a built-in GPS navigator and a barometer. But the disadvantage is that such devices must be made directly in the measured area and these devices must be available. And if you just have to travel or you are taking height measurements to expand your own horizons, then the easiest way is to use Google Earth or. Indeed, in this case, in order to determine the height, just click in the found on satellite map point.

Another argument in favor of measuring on a map is to determine geographical coordinates and height above sea level, there is no need to independently determine and calculate values ​​\u200b\u200busing a barometer, tables or formulas. Indeed, for a person not connected with the need for accurate metrological measurements, the result determined by a satellite map is quite enough.

But if you need to specifically determine the height at which the office, apartment or roof of the house is located above sea level, then you will have to do the measurements yourself. It is possible to determine the height above sea level on a satellite map of any area on Earth, but the height of structures cannot be determined. Even if a specific building is selected, you will only get information about the height of the terrain. And further. If a point is found on a planet that does not have altitude data in the Google service, then the program calculates the average value calculated from the four nearest coordinates for which the altitude is determined. But the deviation from the actual value may be insignificant. It should also be noted that with the help of this service it is also possible to determine the depths of oceans and seas. In this case, the calculated height will be represented with negative values, that is, the depth is determined.

Information coordinates:
A piece of land that is below sea level