Large man-made bodies of water at mining sites such as tailings ponds are designed for water to evaporate. Exposure to the greatest tool for evaporation – the sun – means water level changes require water balance tracking due to precipitation and evaporation.
When working with geospatial data on Google Earth (for example, from our AEREarth tool), you might need the elevations for some coordinates. If it’s only a handful, they’re easily found with Google Earth’s interface. But let’s say you want elevations for dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of locations.
We recently wrote a post about a handy Excel workbook you can use to query elevations for a set of coordinates in the Google Maps Application Programming Interface (API). Here, we’ll go over how to do the same thing using Python.