Elevation Finder – Altitude of Any Location Above Sea Level

Elevation finder: how high above sea level is any place?

This elevation finder tells you the altitude of your location, a town, an address, a pair of coordinates or any point you click on the map — in metres and feet above mean sea level. It also shows what that height means in practice: the typical air pressure, the temperature at which water boils there and how much oxygen each breath holds compared with the coast.

Heights are read from a global digital elevation model — the open Terrain Tiles dataset, built from NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), the US Geological Survey’s 3DEP and GMTED2010, NOAA’s ETOPO1 and several national lidar surveys. The page downloads the small map tiles it needs and works out the height in your browser; there is no account and no limit beyond fair use.

How to use the Elevation Finder

1. Type a place (for example Shimla or Denver), a full address, or coordinates such as 28.6139, 77.2090, and press Find elevation.
2. Or press Use my location and allow location access to get the altitude of where you are standing.
3. Read the height in the large box; switch between Metres and Feet at any time.
4. Click any point on the elevation map to read its height; drag (or use the arrow keys) to move and the zoom buttons to see more detail.
5. Every lookup is added to Your lookups; press Copy as CSV to paste the list into a spreadsheet.

Elevation Finder features

How accurate is the elevation?

For most of India, Asia, Africa and South America the height comes from SRTM, a radar survey with a grid of about 30 metres and a typical vertical error of under 10 metres (the mission specification was 16 m). The United States uses 3DEP with a grid of 10 m or better, and parts of Europe use national lidar accurate to well under a metre. Remote areas and steep slopes are less certain, and radar measures the top of dense forest and large buildings rather than the ground beneath them.

Heights are above mean sea level (the geoid). Over the sea, the number is the depth of the sea floor, and lakes are shown at their surface or bottom depending on the survey — the Dead Sea shore really is about 430 m below sea level.

Why does my phone’s GPS altitude differ?

Browsers report GPS altitude above the WGS84 ellipsoid, a smooth mathematical shape, not above sea level. The difference (the geoid height) is tens of metres almost everywhere — roughly −30 to −105 m across India and −10 to −50 m across the contiguous United States — so a phone can show a figure tens of metres lower than the map even when both are right. GPS height is also two to three times less precise than GPS position. For a fixed place, the map elevation is usually the better number; for a summit log, use both.

What the extra numbers mean

Pressure uses the International Standard Atmosphere and the boiling point uses the Antoine equation for water, the same method as the boiling point at altitude calculator. Real pressure varies a few percent with the weather. Above about 900 m, recipes may need changes — see the high-altitude baking adjuster. Altitude sickness becomes possible above about 2,500 m; these figures are for information, not medical advice.

Privacy and data

Your GPS position is used only to request the elevation tiles for that area and is never stored. Place names that are not in the built-in list of major cities are looked up on OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim service when you press the button, one search at a time. To convert the coordinates you find, use the coordinate converter; to time a walk with climbs, the hiking time calculator.