Display Absolute Elevation in Profile View (SAR Locators etc.)

Dean van der Merwe

Feature request: Access/display the absolute elevation on the profile view for a tracks (esp. SMS Locators) 

Why: Search and Rescue relevant. In mountainous terrain, small changes in horizontal distance can have massive corresponding changes in elevation. In many cases, large cliffs, drop-offs, and deep valleys mean that navigating to two different points that are merely "30m apart" horizontally when viewed on a flat map may require completely different approaches/paths. Not being able to determine the elevation of points in track leads to guesswork on how to navigate to a given Lat Lon coordinate. The data is clearly available in the back-end but not easy to access in-the-field via the app.

In a mountainous area with many horizontal ledges, knowing the elevation of a point in a track will help someone familiar with the area to know how to navigate to it and in some cases the elevation may actually more relevant for navigation than the Lat Lon coordinates (e.g. at which approx elevation the ledge system to traverse on to access a particular point on a track can be found).  

Example SAR use case:

A party was stuck on a ledge on a mountain on a steep face (nighttime, in a position where it was difficult to see the party). Due to the party being against a cliff, there is a significant GPS error, and single / once-off "pins" or coordinate snapshots can vary wildly, and the error is often unknown (the error in vertical elevation is even worse than the horizontal error). We send the party an SMS locator and ask them to keep it open in a browser for 3 - 5 minutes so that a track is recorded on a map. Even though the party is stationary, the drifting GPS coordinates (which we assume includes the GPS elevation) are recorded as a track on the map, which can be viewed using the profile feature. When viewing the track recorded over time, it becomes relatively easy to see which points on the tracks are erroneous/spurious and where the "location converges" because the party is stationary in real life, and the apparent movement is all due to GPS error. The current app interface makes it relatively easy to visualise and determine a "best guess" for the party's Lat Lon, but determining the absolute elevation on the profile view is difficult.  

The current profile view seems only to provide relative elevation data, which is not helpful because of the GPS error; we are dealing with unknown start and end elevations in the first place (the cumulative elevation changes are meaningless in this use case in any case). The feature request is to display the absolute/true elevation as an additional metric in the profile view when navigating the points on the track so that it would be possible to, via moving between points, work out a "best estimate" for elevation.

Warm regards from the Mountain Club of South Africa Search and Rescue

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