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How “U” shaped is your valley

Something that will either bring make warm memories or horror to people who studied Physical Geography at School is the creation of valley profiles, in particular to illustrate the erosional effect of glaciers in the recent Geological past..

OK, so that’s at least 50% of my readership which have clicked away.. the rest of you, welcome you are true geographers – be proud !!

Well now the process has become a little easier, a few weeks ago Google announced the latest extension to the Maps v3 API which provides programatic access to the underlying global terrain model used in Google Maps/Earth.

So now a profile across Snowdonia for example is easy..

From a techie point of view as well as the familiar  javascript API interface to this, there is also a RESTful web service API that provides output in JSON or simple XML.

Written and Submitted from the Googleplex (37.426N, 122.070W)

2 replies on “How “U” shaped is your valley”

Is there any way to mark or label the path corner points in the elevation profile? Such as either a different bar color within the chart or with a line top to bottom over the chart. So in the screen capture above the profile would show three sections representing the three legs on the path.

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