Elevation

The elevation of the launch site is particularly important for determining the rocket’s interaction with the atmosphere and Earth’s gravitational field.

Known elevation

If the elevation, measured in meters above sea level, is known, it can be used to initialize an Environment class instance as follows:

from rocketpy import Environment

env = Environment(elevation=110)

You can change the elevation at any time by using the following method:

env.set_elevation(120)

Using Open-Elevation API

Fortunately, there are alternatives to find an approximate value of the elevation if the latitude and longitude values are known.

One very useful and handy option is to use Open-Elevation, a free and open-source elevation API. It is integrated with RocketPy and can be used as follows.

First, initialize a new Environment:

env = Environment(
    date=(2019, 2, 10, 18),
    latitude=-21.960641,
    longitude=-47.482122
)

Then, set the elevation using Open-Elevation:

env.set_elevation("Open-Elevation")

To get information from the Environment, use the following method:

env.prints.launch_site_details()

Using Atmospheric Models

One option is to use the elevation data supplied by some atmospheric models. Since elevation data is crucial for numerical weather prediction, some weather models make elevation data available together with other variables. This will be covered in the Atmospheric Models section.