DEM using Google Earth — a tutorial.

And creating contours using that data is much easier than you think.

Digital Elevation Model (DEM) depicts the elevation of a surface between known elevation points. This tutorial shows you how to use Google Earth’s elevation data to generate a DEM. In today’s world, DEMs are mostly used in GIS applications.

Of course, We can download the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) from the USGS website. But if we want to know the elevation data of a location and with no time to download coordinate-wise DEM, we can create a beautiful contour map by just using Google Earth, any GIS software and a free third party data format changing utilities like GPS visualizer or mygeodata.cloud.

Here is a stepwise tutorial for creating a DEM using Google Earth and drawing contour using ArcGIS.

1. Creating a kml file in Google Earth for our area of interest

When we open Google Earth and move the cursor around, we can see the elevation changing in the bottom right corner of the window. If your screen shows 0 meters, you should check the terrain checkbox in your left layers pane. If it is off, check on the terrain box.