Author Topic: How accurate are Google Earth coordinates and altitude? -Weather Exchange  (Read 4348 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline gfmucci

  • Senior Contributor
  • ****
  • Posts: 202
Google Earth seems to be a good source for latitude and longitude coordinates and elevation above MSL.  How accurate is it?

Concerning entering coordinates in the "sttings":"your location" section of Weather Exchange, my coordinates wouldn't "stick" and kept getting bumped to other numbers, causing the "nearest" weather stations to be further away.

I wonder what's happening there.  Is it my numbers? Or is there something about Weather Exchange location settings I'm not understanding?

Offline ocala

  • Forecaster
  • *****
  • Posts: 4383
I don't run that program but I'm assuming they want the coordinates to be in decimal form. I'm pretty sure Google Earth presents them in degrees, minutes, and seconds.
Just Google a conversion program and put the right numbers in.
I think. :-)
The blues had a baby and they named it Rock & Roll

Offline gfmucci

  • Senior Contributor
  • ****
  • Posts: 202
Thanks for that tip.  I initially plugged in degrees minutes, seconds.  I tried the conversion to decimals, and it still changes the numbers on me.

For example when I enter Longitude of 81.959347, it pops the numbers to
-81.2676086.

Latitude does the same thing:  It changes 28.887069 to 28.9154701.  In fact, it doesn't allow me to create blank fields.  The wrong numbers seem to be permantently embedded in the fields.
Does anyone know rhyme or reason for not accpeting my coordinates?

Offline ocala

  • Forecaster
  • *****
  • Posts: 4383
On the longitude numbers make sure you put a minus sign before the 81. That just might do it.
The blues had a baby and they named it Rock & Roll

Offline gfmucci

  • Senior Contributor
  • ****
  • Posts: 202
It puts its own negative sign in the field.  There is nothing I can do anymore to change the imbedded latitude and longitude, even when I delete the city, state and zip code info.