The hot thing in the GIS world today is the LIDAR elevation mapping, which uses airplanes to map elevation with an accuracy down to 1 or 2m (3-6 ft). Most maps traditionally use Digital Elevation Model mapping, which is about 10m accurate, which gets you elevation numbers which can be off as much as 30 feet, and is based not on actual computer imagining, but instead on old topographic surveys which don’t always reflect the latest data.

I had previously tried to down the Albany County contours from the NYSGIS website, which are available in the ERSI GDB format, how apparently the contours were made in an older version of GDB, which lacks an open source driver. However I also discovered yesterday that NYSGIS offers all that data as conventional DEM files, which are easily read by almost every GIS client.

There are a lot of interesting possibilities for using these higher resolution files.