Visualizing Contour (Topographic) Maps In Google Earth

hello and welcome to giono today I'm going to show you how to visualize contour or topographic maps in Google Earth now the reason I wanted to show you this video is because I think it's a good way to visualize exactly what these squiggly lines even represent now you may know that they represent elevation and it's a representation of a 3d space on a 2d surface which is an important thing to be able to do but I wanted to show you since Google Earth has 3d topography what exactly it looks like when you drape these contours over a 3d surface and so you can get a better idea in your mind exactly what these contours represent so that's what you can expect going forward you'll see the little tour through Google Earth through a few locations with draped contour maps and then at the end I'm going to have you test your knowledge to see how well you understand basic contour shapes alright let's go ahead and take a look at these three locations here in Google Earth we're going to start with Enchanted Rock so all I'm going to do is just double click on the thing I already have established if you need to search in the search bar for Enchanted Rock you'll be able to find it really easily so here we are let's take a look at it without the contour map draped over it first so you'll notice it's just a few hilltops that are pretty rounded all together and you'll be able to tell a little bit more what the map represents when it's draped on top so let's go ahead and put it on there's the map so you'll notice again those bull's-eyes represent the tops of hills and if I open up the properties I can adjust the opacity so you can see that beneath each one it does indeed correspond to a hilltop below it there you go maybe you can see a little bit better if I rotate it a bit all right so that is what enchanted rock contour map represents another thing we can do in Google Earth is we could get a topographic profile so that's kind of what what it would look like if you were going from point A to point B and you were just going to hike what would you encounter so let's go ahead and do that by adding a path and let's entitle it and chanted Rock and then just click OK oh I actually you can't just click OK you have to draw your line and then click okay so click on a and then click on B and it'll draw a line from those two points and you'll be able to now click OK and then right click on it to say show elevation profile alright so if we're starting from the left side we're on the top of a smaller hill we go down into a small Valley we come up to the top of a little bit of a bigger hill then we go down into a main Valley a bigger Valley and then come up to the main Enchanted Rock which everyone goes and visits and then you come down into a valley and then come back up to another little peak and that's exactly what we would expect so that is a topographic profile and I have another video on how to create a topographic profile if you'd like to watch that go ahead and take a look in my videos click the link that I'm showing now and you'll be able to find that video if you want to learn how to create topographic profiles manually alright let's go ahead and look at another location called meteor crater so again instead of a hilltop this is a crater and I want to show you the difference between the two things because they both look like bull's-eyes but they are represented differently so if we go ahead and drape our image click it on remember the tick marks mean that you're going down into a depression and so you could you can look there if it didn't have the tick marks you would easily visualize in your mind that that was just the hilltop but now you're not confused and you know it's a depression or a crater instead now if we want to get a topographic profile of that we can go ahead and do that too so go ahead and add a path and we'll just call a meteor crater oh I did the same thing again so just remember you have to have your properties open to draw the line so let's draw a line from the left to the right just to get a good representation of our crater now we can click OK right click on it go to show elevation profile and just as we expected sometimes Google Earth has some funny things happen and that's just because the elevation data isn't entirely precise all of the time but in general it gives us a pretty good view of the topographic profile so we do have a pretty flat area we go down into the crater we come back up and then we go back into the flat area so that's meteor crater let's go to our last place Capulin volcano which shows both things a depression and a hilltop so let's close out of our profile as well so that's that's what you can see this is a typical volcano which is big steep hill and then at the top you have a crater let's see what it looks like with the draped image on top of it so you can see our contour lines representing an increase in elevation as you get to the top you'll notice at the top of our hill we have two mini bull's-eyes and let me show you why that is if I open up the properties I can decrease the opacity a bit and we can look and see that there are indeed two mini Hills on top of the main hill and that's what those little bull's-eyes represent all right and then once you get down into the crater you've got tick marks just to show everybody that you're going down into a depression instead of a hilltop all right so again we've got a little a 2b line so let's take a look at the profile there we'll see if I can do it correctly this time so we'll add our path Capulin volcano and then before we close it out we've got to click on a and then click on B to draw a line between the two points now we can click OK right-click it say show elevation profile and again it's got a little bit of a glitchyness to it just from google Earth's and accuracy of elevation data but in general you go up you go into the crater you come out of the crater and you go back down alright that's Capulin Mountain hopefully this has helped you alright it's time to test your knowledge and see how well you understand the idea of contours so what I'm going to have you do is take the left column which is a contour map so you're kind of in an airplane looking down at the topography and then you're going to match it up with the one that it belongs to on the right so you're going to match up the numbers with the correct letter so go ahead and pause the video and see if you can match up the correct letter with the correct number all right let's go ahead and go through these and just see how you did so the first one we know we have concentric circles getting smaller and smaller kind of like a bull's-eye but the peak is more on the right side so it's going to match best with letter C number two we see we have two peaks and so there's three different pictures that have two peaks so we need to figure out which one matches best now you may notice that the right side has more contour lines so there's 1 2 3 4 5 so you went up higher in elevation than you did on this side 1 2 3 4 contour lines so you know your peak is going to be higher on the right than on the left so the best match would be d now number 3 now you'll notice these little tick marks mean that there's a crater or a depression at the top of the hill and so the best match with that you're going to have Peaks that are equal on each side so that best matches with a the number 4 you've got a peak kind of to the left and it's a little bit broad so it best matches with E probably one of the easier ones now the easiest one is probably number 5 it's just a straight up bullseye right in the center which best matches up with B and then 6 my process of deduction is F of course but let's think about why that is so if you go to your contours you'll notice you have 1 2 3 4 5 contours on the left so you went up a little bit higher than you did on the right which you only went up 1 2 3 4 contours on the right so you're going to have a higher peak on the left and a lower peak on the right so hopefully you did well I hope this helped you visualize contours a little bit better and good luck to you let me know in the comments below if you have any questions any videos that you would like me to make and please don't forget to subscribe and thank you so much for watching [Music]

Channel: Geo Know

Views: 270,364

Keywords: Visual, Visualize, Visualization, Visualizing, Contour, Topographic, Maps, Mapping, Google, Google Earth, Image drape, 2D, 3D, How to, Multiple choice, image overlay google earth, google earth (software), topographic maps, making sense of contours, making sense of topographic maps, 3d visualization of contour map, topographic maps earth science, topographic maps for kids, topographic maps google earth, how to picture topographic maps, google earth pro, contour lines

Id: 55BNufFfXdc

Length: 8min 31sec (511 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 28 2016