Ruaumoko: Elevation API for Tawhiri

A Python module and web API for worldwide elevation data.

This project is a part of the larger Tawhiri Landing Predictor Software.

The digital elevation data is sourced from the Viewfinder Panoramas website.

See the CUSF wiki for more details: http://www.cusf.co.uk/wiki/ruaumoko.

Authors

See AUTHORS.

License

Ruaumoko is Copyright 2014 (see AUTHORS & individual files) and licensed under the GNU GPL 3 (see LICENSE).

Dependencies

Python dependences may be found in requirements.txt. To run the downloader you will also require the convert command (from imagemagick).

Running a development webserver

The ruaumoko-api command can be used to run a development web server.

$ ruaumoko-api runserver

This will use the default configuration. To use a custom configuration to, for example, change the dataset location and enable debugging use the RUAUMOKO_SETTINGS environment variable:

$ cat > ruaumoko-development.txt <<EOL
ELEVATION_DIRECTORY = '/path/to/your/dataset'
DEBUG = True
EOL
$ RUAUMOKO_SETTINGS=ruaumoko-development.txt ruaumoko-api runserver

Dataset Format

Throughout Ruaumoko, data is indexed latitude-first/row-first

The 15-arcsecond (i.e., dividing a degree into 240 points) data comes as a grid of 24 TIFs, named A-X (C layout). Each TIF is a 10801 by 14401 array of 16 bit signed integers. The download script concatenates the arrays (after unpacking the TIFs) to get a single binary file, which is cast to an array with dimensions (4, 6, 10801, 14401).

Note that 4 * 10800 = 180 * 240 and 6 * 14400 = 360 * 240.

Each TIF overlaps with the ones on each side by one row, that is, the 10801th row of 'A' is the same as the 1st row of chunk 'G'.

The top left corner of chunk A is at (lat) 90 (lng) -180. Latitude decreases down the rows; longitude increases along the columns.