3 replies to this topic

[Giggles]

Hi Guys,

I been digging around the USGS site and for the life of me I cannot find data downloads for spot elevations and benchmarks. I tried to download USGS Digital line graphs but they are not shapefiles. Cannot find instructions on how to covert file formats. Can anyone give a pointer or two on how I can get my hands on spot elevations and benchmarks in GIS format?

[Adam Wilbert]

The USGS Board on Geographic Names has a data download section where you can filter to "summit" and get a text file of lat/long/elevation/name. You can import that as XY in Arc, and export it as a shapefile. You might have to go through Excel or something first to format the text file though. I'm not sure how Arc would handle a pipe-delimited text file directly.

http://geonames.usgs...wnload_data.htm
Click Search on the left to filter results by feature class.

[Charles Syrett]

Following Adam's lead, I would make a tab delimited text file with the top line reading Summit (tab) Address. Then paste the list with a tab separating the name (you may have to make up numbers for this – I haven't looked at the data myself) and the lat-long ("addresses"). Take the whole text file and copy-paste into BatchGeo. It'll plot them onto a Google map display. From BatchGeo, you can export as kml, which will easily be read by any GIS.

Charles Syrett
Map Graphics
http://www.mapgraphics.com

[Giggles]

Thanks for the help. I was able to successfully convert to shapefiles. Cheers to you both.