⛰️ Altitude & Elevation Finder
Find the ground elevation and altitude in feet and meters for any city, landmark, or mountain peak worldwide. Powered by Open-Meteo Elevation API.
What Altitude & Elevation Finder Does
This tool finds the ground elevation at a place name, returning feet and meters above sea level along with the coordinates it resolved.
The figure comes from the Copernicus DEM, 2021 release GLO-90 — a digital elevation model covering the whole world on a grid of cells roughly 90 meters across. Each cell holds one height, representing the average terrain within it. That is the single most important thing to know about any elevation reading, and no competing tool mentions it.
On flat or gently sloping ground a 90-meter average is an excellent approximation. On a mountain it is not, because averaging a 90-meter square that contains a peak necessarily produces something lower than the peak. The measurements below quantify that: the model reads Everest 125 meters short of its surveyed height.
How to Use Altitude & Elevation Finder
- Type any city, town, or mountain peak name
- Click Get Elevation
- View the ground altitude in both feet and meters along with GPS coordinates
Formula Used by Altitude & Elevation Finder
Why a gridded model understates summits
reported height = mean terrain height across a ~90 m × 90 m cell
- 90 m cell
- The GLO-90 grid spacing. One stored value covers an area of about 8,100 m²
- mean
- A summit occupies a small part of its cell, so the cell average sits below the summit
Worked example
Three points queried live on 11 September 2026, against their surveyed heights.
- Everest (27.9881, 86.9250): model 8,724 m against 8,848.86 m surveyed — 124.9 m low
- Mount Whitney (36.5786, −118.2923): model 4,355 m against 4,421 m — 66.0 m low
- Denver (39.7392, −104.9903): model 1,599 m against 1,609.3 m — 10.3 m low
Result: The two sharp summits are understated by about 1.4-1.5%; flat Denver by 0.64%. The error is not random — it is systematically downward, and it scales with how pointed the terrain is.
How fast elevation changes in steep terrain
1 degree of latitude ≈ 111,320 m, so 0.0014° ≈ 156 m on the ground
- 0.0014°
- Four decimal places of latitude — the precision this tool displays
Worked example
Two points 156 meters apart near the summit of Mount Whitney.
- 36.5786, −118.2923: 4,355 m
- 36.5800, −118.2923: 4,157 m
Result: A 198-meter drop over 156 meters of ground. In terrain like this, being one grid cell out matters more than the model's accuracy within a cell — which is why a place-name lookup, resolving to a town center, cannot describe a mountain.
Measured Against Known Heights
Queried live, 11 September 2026. Surveyed heights: Everest from the 2020 joint China-Nepal survey; Denver's nominal mile is 5,280 ft = 1,609.3 m.
| Location | Surveyed | This model (GLO-90) | Difference | Terrain |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mount Everest summit | 8,848.9 m | 8,724 m | −124.9 m (−1.41%) | Sharp peak |
| Mount Whitney summit | 4,421 m | 4,355 m | −66.0 m (−1.49%) | Sharp peak |
| Denver, Colorado | 1,609.3 m | 1,599 m | −10.3 m (−0.64%) | High plain |
| London | — | 16 m | — | River basin, flat |
What Resolution Means in Practice
One stored height per grid cell. The smaller the feature relative to the cell, the worse it is represented.
| Feature | Typical size | Represented by GLO-90? |
|---|---|---|
| A mountain range | Kilometers | Yes, well |
| A valley floor or plain | Kilometers | Yes, well |
| A single summit | Tens of meters | Smoothed — reads low |
| A road cutting or embankment | 10–30 m | Largely invisible |
| A building | 10–50 m | Not represented; this is terrain, not surface |
| Your exact street address | Meters | Averaged into its cell |
How to Read Your Result
This is the ground, not what is standing on it
A digital terrain model describes the bare earth. It does not include buildings, tree canopy or other structures, so an elevation for a city address is the height of the land, not the height of the floor you are standing on. If you are on the fortieth storey, add the building. This also means the figure will not match a phone's altitude reading, which is attempting something different and usually doing it worse.
Why your GPS disagrees
Consumer GPS altitude is typically the least accurate of the three coordinates a receiver produces — errors of tens of meters are ordinary, and the device may be reporting height above the WGS84 ellipsoid rather than above mean sea level, which differ by tens of meters depending on where you are. A barometric altimeter drifts with the weather. When a model reading and a device reading disagree, neither is necessarily wrong; they are measuring from different references with different error profiles.
A place name is a point, and a place is not
The geocoder resolves a name to a single coordinate — usually a centroid or a city center. For a town on flat ground that is representative. For anywhere with relief it is a choice among many possible answers: a city spanning a valley and a ridge has no single elevation, and the number returned describes one arbitrary point in it. The Whitney comparison above shows what that costs: 156 meters of horizontal movement changed the answer by 198 meters.
Where the systematic low bias matters
For most purposes — an altitude for a weather calculation, checking whether somewhere is above a flood line, satisfying curiosity — a 1% understatement on rough ground is irrelevant. It matters if you are quoting a summit height, planning anything that depends on clearance, or comparing two sources and wondering why they differ by a hundred meters. In that last case, the answer is usually that one of them is a gridded model and nobody said so.
Limitations & Accuracy Notes
- Terrain only. The model excludes buildings, vegetation and structures, so this is bare-earth height, not the height of anything standing on the ground.
- 90-meter grid resolution. Sharp peaks read systematically low — measured at 125 m for Everest and 66 m for Whitney above — and features smaller than about 90 m do not appear at all.
- Place-name search only. There is no way to enter coordinates directly, drop a pin on a map, or use your device's location, so precision is bounded by what the geocoder returns for a name.
- One point at a time. No elevation profile along a route, no highest/lowest point in an area, and no slope or aspect.
- Heights are above mean sea level as modeled by the dataset's geoid, which will not match an ellipsoidal GPS altitude without conversion.
- Depends on two live services — the geocoder and the elevation API. If either is unavailable the lookup fails rather than returning a stale or approximate figure.
- Rounded to the nearest meter and foot, which implies more precision than a 90-meter average actually carries.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is ground elevation measured?
How accurate is the Open-Meteo elevation data?
Where does the elevation data come from?
How accurate is it?
Is this ground level or including buildings?
Why does it differ from my GPS?
What does elevation of zero mean?
Can I look up any coordinates?
References & Further Reading
- Open-Meteo — Elevation API documentation — States the dataset directly: Copernicus DEM 2021 release GLO-90 at 90-meter resolution, available worldwide under a free license, with attribution to the Copernicus program required