firetree.net A simple C++ interface to NASA's SRTM Elevation data. I use this code in my Flood Maps project. This code will only run on a Unix operating system.
Download it here: nasagrid.tgz
You can read about this data here:
You can download the data by FTP from:
SRTM3 is ready to use, and covers the whole world. SRTM1 has 3 times the
resolution of SRTM3, but it only covers North America, and the file naming
scheme is somewhat haphazard, so you'll need to manually rename some of the
files before you can use them.
INSTRUCTIONS
1. Get the data files
Set the environment variable ROOT_PATH to tell the code where to find the data
files. (You can also set the C++ macro ROOT_PATH, to the same effect.)
Create a directory called $ROOT_PATH/data.
Download the datafiles you require, and place them into your new directory.
Unzip them. You don't need to get all of the files. Any missing files will be
skipped, and the software will tell you that those areas have "NO_DATA".
The file names should follow NASA's 'SRTM3' naming scheme. The case is
IMPORTANT. Here are examples of valid file names...
N43E004.hgt S10W139.hgt
2. Write your code
The interface is quite simple. Construct a Grid object, and call its height()
method to get the height above mean sea level for a given lat/long coordinate.
Here's a very simple example.
#include "grid.h"
#include "nasagridsquare.h"
#include
int main() {
float lat,lng;
std::cin >> lat >> lng;
Grid<NasaGridSquare> g;
std::cout << g.height(lng,lat) << std::endl;
return 0;
}
The Grid class caches the most recently used 360 data files in memory, in order
to improve performance. If you have less than a Gigabyte of memory, you might
need to reduce this number. (Of course, if you have much more memory, you could
increase the limit.)
Set the cache limit like this:
Grid<NasaGridSquare>::cache_limit = 100;
3. Publish your source code.
This software is licensed under the GPL. If you wish to redistribute it, then
remember to comply with the terms.