GCADQCM Elevation Short By Over 2/3 [closed]

Question

Hi there,

I recently noticed that the Project-GC elevation for one of my caches, GCADQCM, is significantly off. PGC lists it at 641m, whereas its actual elevation is about 2100m. I understand that the elevation data can be off, but with this being such a significant difference I was wondering if it may be the result of a bug that can be fixed.

The cache is new, having been published just a month ago if that helps. Let me know if there's any other info you need!

Thanks,
-Bobby (garretslarrity)

Answer 1

You are correct, this is out of acceptance.

The service provider we use for elevation data has recently (~1 week ago) made major updates to its service. Primarily they now have more and improved data for some countries, but there are also some math improvements. Therefor we are now going through all existing geocaches to update their elevation data. A process that we have estimated to process for 3 weeks.

This particular point is obviously not an improvement, but a major setback. I have created a bug report to the service provider. From former experience they usually answer in 1-2 work days. Then depending on the issue there might be some time before there is an actual fix.

Once we know what they'll do and how big the affected area is we will schedule another update for the geocaches that might have been affected.

If your geocache doesn't correct its elevation data in 1-2 weeks and you don't get any feedback here, feel free to leave a comment on my answer. I will then get an email and be reminded, and in turn I will tell you what I know so far, and depending on what I know, send a reminder to my contact.

EDIT:

The affected area is one of the areas that has a new dataset if I understand it correctly. The elevation data should be very exact for the area. In fact there should be elevation data for every square meter.

The error here is most likely easy for the service provider to fix though. We have had a similar issue a few years back in another area. The issue is feet vs meters. 641 meters = 2103 feet. You should expect this geocache to change into 2104(.457ish) meters. Which is very close to its old value of 2104.19 meters.

Comments

All geocaches in this area is likely to be affected:
+--------------+---------------+--------------+---------------+
| min_latitude | min_longitude | max_latitude | max_longitude |
+--------------+---------------+--------------+---------------+
|    33.901033 |   -117.772653 |    34.750100 |   -116.895250 |
+--------------+---------------+--------------+---------------+

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Thank you for your response! Dang imperial system still haunts us! I'll update here within a few weeks

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The service provider got back to us yesterday. Quite late our timezone so didn't look into it until now.

He has reverted changes for that area and will validate that data and re-implement it in a later version, once it's verified.

We have scheduled a second update of the ~74,000 potentially affected geocaches in the area and we estimate this to 6-12 hours. So hopefully your elevation is restored "today" your time.

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The fix has gone through! Thank you so much!!