Python Geospatial Analysis Cookbook

Creating an elevation profile

Creating an elevation profile is very helpful when trying to visualize a 3D terrain cross-section or simply to see the elevation gain of a bike tour. In this example, we will define our own LineString geometry and extract the elevation values from the DEMs that are located every 20 m along our line. The analysis will generate a new CSV file that we can open in Libre Office Calc or Microsoft Excel to visualize the new data as a line chart.

The 2D view of our line plotted on top of the elevation model as seen inside QGIS looks like this:

Getting ready

This recipe calls for GDAL and Shapely. Make sure that you have them installed ...