What is StavroTopo? Click to learn more
StavroTopo is my favorite terrain visualization method and is now available for the whole world. Just click the crosshairs to see your your current location! This visualization is useful because it includes a combination of hillshade, elevation color ramp, and contour lines. Wherever you go, red is high and blue is low; this makes it intuitive to visualize drainage and topographic constraints over a variety of scales. (Also, the surface is also astoundingly high resolution.) As you zoom in, you will first see 10-ft contours overlaying the hillshade. As you zoom closer, these become 2-ft contours.
This map also includes option to draw elevation profiles, a USA Parcels Layer from ReGrid, and options to substitute the underlying USGS basemap with aerials and other basemaps. All data shown on StavroTopo is owned and served by 3rd parties and is freely available. So what's unique about StavroTopo? In short, StavroTopo is unique because of server-side processing that quickly converts terrabyte-scale raster datasets to the StavroTopo visualization. (Well, it's pretty quick, but the 10-ft and 2-ft contours can take a moment to calculate and then display.) Although this data has been free and publicly available for a decade, downloading, processing, and visualizing have been notoriously cumbersome until StavroTopo.
The hillshade and elevation color ramp are provided by ESRI and cover the entire world at varying resolution. The Contour data is provided by the USGS and covers only the US.
This map also includes option to draw elevation profiles, a USA Parcels Layer from ReGrid, and options to substitute the underlying USGS basemap with aerials and other basemaps. All data shown on StavroTopo is owned and served by 3rd parties and is freely available. So what's unique about StavroTopo? In short, StavroTopo is unique because of server-side processing that quickly converts terrabyte-scale raster datasets to the StavroTopo visualization. (Well, it's pretty quick, but the 10-ft and 2-ft contours can take a moment to calculate and then display.) Although this data has been free and publicly available for a decade, downloading, processing, and visualizing have been notoriously cumbersome until StavroTopo.
The hillshade and elevation color ramp are provided by ESRI and cover the entire world at varying resolution. The Contour data is provided by the USGS and covers only the US.