Method and sources

Three kinds of numbers appear on this site: figures quoted from federal pages, town elevations we read ourselves from USGS data, and snowfall averages from NOAA station records. Here is how each is handled.

Quoted figures

Every lake, ocean, mountain and park figure is shown with the sentence it came from, copied word for word, plus the page link and the date we read it. A build check refuses to publish if a quote is no longer found in our saved copy of the page, or if a number in our summary does not appear in the quote. When two official pages disagree (Yellowstone Lake's deepest point is one case), both are shown.

The Great Lakes table comes from a scanned PDF, and its text layer reads some commas as slashes (1/332 for 1,332). Our check changes a slash between two digits back to a comma, then requires all five values of each row to appear in order on that PDF page.

Town elevations

  1. Where is the town? We take the primary latitude and longitude of the populated place from the USGS Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) state files.
  2. How high is that point? We open the USGS 3D Elevation Program (3DEP) 1 arc-second tile covering it and read the grid cell that contains the point. We do not interpolate between cells.
  3. Units. The grid is in meters. Feet are meters divided by 0.3048, rounded to the nearest foot.
  4. Spread. We also read the eight surrounding cells and show the lowest and highest of the nine, so you can see how much the ground varies right around the point.

A town-wide "official" elevation does not exist in this data. Our table names the GNIS record ID and the tile for every town, so anyone can repeat the reading. The current 24 towns were read on 2026-09-28.

Snowfall

  1. Which numbers. NOAA’s 1991–2020 climate normals for monthly snowfall at one weather station per place. We name the station and its ID next to every figure.
  2. Where we get them. The data is retrieved through ACIS, the data service of NOAA’s Regional Climate Centers, with one station query per place. Each query is linked, so you can run it yourself.
  3. What we do to them. Monthly values are shown exactly as returned, in inches. The yearly figure is the twelve monthly values added together. We do not say whether a place “gets snow”; the numbers are there to read.

A weather station is a single spot and is not where we read a town’s elevation, so the station’s own elevation is listed separately. The current 13 stations were read on 2026-09-28.

How our fetcher behaves

Pages and data files are fetched by a script that identifies itself as ElevationFactsBot/1.0 with a link to this page. It follows each site's robots.txt, waits at least three seconds between requests to the same host, requests only the byte ranges it needs from large data files, and stops at the first refusal. A host that turns it away is not retried under another name.

Pages quoted

Data files read

The GNIS state file and the 3DEP tile used for each town are linked from its row in the town elevation table. The snowfall station queries are linked from the snowfall table.