No elevation for Finland and northern Sweden

openelevationservice
1

Hi, just started using your openelevationservice for my mobile app. It looks like I’m getting an error for all elevation requests in Finland and northern parts of Sweden. Otherwise my test requests are working fine across the globe. Is this some data source failure or are elevation requests unsupported for this area?

An example request to the API below. Coordinates are lon, lat as instructed by API documentation.
https://api.openrouteservice.org/elevation/point?geometry=23.000000,63.000000&api_key=APIKEY

Server response:
“{"code":4002,"message":"GeometryError: The requested geometry is outside the bounds of srtm"}\n”

2

Did you read the error message? That says it all, really. If memory serves me right, it was mentioned in the ORS documentation at some point as well, but I can’t find it anywhere anymore. Anyway: The elevation service uses SRTM, which is only available between 60° north and 56° south latitude. See the USGS SRTM website for more info.

3

Ah right, it is mentioned as “radar data over 80% of the Earth’s land surface between 60° north and 56° south latitude”.

I think I quickly just read the multiple mentions of “global coverage” and assumed it would work.

Hmm, too bad. Since v2/directions API already returns elevation data for Finland, I assumed the elevation API would as well. Why aren’t these APIs using the same data sets?

By the way, I recently set up my own elevation data server and used aster30m as it seemed to have good coverage of most of the globe. I only had disk space to cover Europe, though. Could openelevationservice also use this data set instead of srtm for better global coverage?