Altitude and Feature Requests

since your data is based on USGS’s North America elevation dataset, if you’re just trying to get this data into a tabular format in Excel, it might be easier to get this using the data using the USGS’s Elevation API.

this explains how to get results from that API in Excel: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/an-optimized-workflow-to-determine-the-altitude-of-an-observation/17465/6; however, the API has changed a bit since that post, and you would now use these formulas:

  • in C1: =WEBSERVICE("https://epqs.nationalmap.gov/v1/xml?y="&A1&"&x="&B1&"&units=Feet&")
  • in D1: =MID($C1,FIND("<value>",$C1)+7,FIND("</value>",$C1)-FIND("<value>",$C1)-7)

here’s an example of what a request to that API would return: https://epqs.nationalmap.gov/v1/xml?y=30&x=-90&units=Feet

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