OpenTopography Point Elevation API — Demo Notebook

A Jupyter notebook demonstrating how to use the OpenTopography Point Elevation API to retrieve and compare elevation values across multiple global datasets at a single geographic coordinate.

What this notebook does

Rather than downloading and processing a full DEM for an area of interest, the Point Elevation API returns the interpolated elevation at a single point from any of the datasets hosted by OpenTopography. This makes it well suited for workflows like:

• Annotating a list of addresses or GPS waypoints with elevation
• Rapid cross-dataset comparison at specific field sites
• Validating or correcting elevation values in tabular datasets

The notebook queries three representative locations (urban, arid desert, forested) across 16 global elevation datasets, then produces a multi-panel figure showing the elevation from each dataset alongside regional and satellite map context.

Datasets included

Vertical datum	Datasets
EGM2008 Geoid	COP30, COP90, EU_DTM
EGM96 Geoid	SRTM_GL1, SRTM_GL3, NASADEM, AW3D30, SRTM15Plus, GEBCOIceTopo, GEBCOSubIceTopo
WGS84 Ellipsoid	GEDI_L3, AW3D30_E, SRTM_GL1_Ellip, GEDTM30
NAVD88	USGS10m, USGS30m

Requirements

pip install requests matplotlib numpy contextily geopandas shapely

contextily and geopandas are only used for the map panels. If you only want the elevation bar charts, those two packages are not required.

Getting an API key

A free OpenTopography account and API key are required to run the notebook.

1. Register at https://portal.opentopography.org/newUser
2. Request an API key at https://portal.opentopography.org/requestService?service=api
3. Paste your key into the API_KEY variable in the Configuration cell

API usage limits

During the initial release of the Point Elevation API the following daily query limits apply:

User type	Limit
Registered OpenTopography user	50 queries/day
OT+ member or academic user (.edu email)	250 queries/day

Running the notebook

jupyter notebook PointElevationAPI_demo.ipynb

Run all cells in order. The data-fetching cell makes one API call per dataset per scenario (48 calls total for the default three scenarios) and typically completes in about 60 seconds.

License

This notebook is provided under the BSD 3-Clause License.