USGS Topographic Maps
USGS Topographic Maps for Google Earth
USGS Topographic maps provide detailed information such as land use, feature names, the locations of natural features, and topographic elevation contours. There are over 50,000 7.5-minute topo maps covering the entire United States (except Alaska, which is covered in a larger scale). The topographic maps come in a variety of scales, with the most detailed typically being the 7.5-minute version, meaning each map covers an area of 0.125 x 0.125 degrees. This collection of maps lets you easily view all 50,000+ of the 7.5-minute USGS topographic maps in Google Earth.
The maps in this collection typically date from around 1978 to 2005. The USGS is constantly updating the topographic maps and it seems to take them about 15 to 20 years to get around to updating each individual map. I also have a separate collection of historic USGS topographic maps for Google Earth.
Each topographic map has been converted to a single Google Earth KMZ file, which is typically about 1-5 megabytes. The maps include the collars (borders), which have information such as the date of the map and the source of the data found on the map.
The topo maps are accessed by a very simple index. Just zoom in until the blue outlines become visible. Then select the Topographic map you wish to view and after a few seconds, it will overlay onto the correct location in Google Earth. Once the map loads, you can use the use the topo maps with the many other features included with Google Earth, such as:
- Import and overlay GPS Tracks
- Adjust the transparency of the top maps
- View Google Earth’s 3D buildings on top of the topo maps
- Output to your printer
- Compare features on the topo maps to the Google Earth imagery
The speed at which the maps load will depend on the speed of your Internet connection and the speed of my web host. When the map is loading, it may look like nothing is happening for a few seconds. But if your on a reasonably fast Internet connection, the map should appear after about 30 seconds to one minute.
To get started, first make sure you have Google Earth installed. Then just click on the button below.
| Click To Begin: |  |
Embed Maps In Website
Several people have asked how to embed these into a personal website or blog. The Topographic Maps can easily be embedded into your own website using the Google Earth Plugin. I don’t believe Google Maps supports this type of KMZ file yet.
The first step in this process is to determine the URL of the map you are intersted in. To determine the URL, find the map you want to embed and write down the map code found in the pop up balloon. For this example, we will use o37122g4, which is San Francisco North California. The URL can be determined by replacing the o37122g4 map code with your map code in the URL below.
http://www.topomaparchive.com/maps/Topos_Current/37122/o37122g4.kmz
Next, go to www.takitwithme.com and paste the URL from above into the box at the top of the page. Click a couple buttons and you’ll have your embed code, which can be put on your web site with results similar to below.
Current Status
- Map Status as of 11/17/2009: FINISHED!!! Contact Me if you find any maps that don’t work. I do plan on adding Alaska at some point, and maybe even Canada.
Copyright and Other Information
These maps are copyright protected since there is KML code included. I’ve decided to release them under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike license.
Please do not try to download more than a 20 or 30 maps per day. I’m hosting these on a shared web host and I must keep the load on my host reasonable if I want to continue to offer them at not cost. I will ban IP addresses if I see abuse. Thank you for your cooperation.
If you find these useful and want to help me keep them free, you can make a donation to my PayPal account, which will help offset some of the expense of creating and maintaining this map collection.
Current Status
This is a huge project and I hope to have it finished by October. Below is the current status and any recent news:
- Map Status as of 10/17/2009: All maps are done. Uploading Latitudes 47 and 48 right now, which will probably take a week or so. Contact Me if you find any others that don’t work.
Awesome work. Do you know of anything similar done for Canada?
I’m actually in the process of downloading all the topo maps from Canada. Unfortunately, I don’t have the server capabilities right now to host them. Maybe someday though.
Thanks for the hard work collecting this information. What is the difference between the data you have collected for google earth and the topo function on NASA worldwind?
I haven’t used the topo layer in World Wind. I’m assuming they pull their data from TerraServer. They should be similar since same data source. But a few differences..
- I think maps I offer are a little higher quality than Terraserver.
- Terraserver is seamless. My maps have the borders (advantages and disadvantages to both)
- My maps can be used off line a little easier
- Terraserver is usually painfully slow
Awesome Work! This is just what I was looking for to plan my backcountry trips.
Beautiful! Until now it was been a very slow and laborious process to create GPS tracks from USGS TOPO maps.
Absolutely AWESOME!
I have been looking a farm property and trying to relate it to an aerial map from Google. Now I get both. I’ve not seen anything better as it relates to Google earth in a long time.
Kudos for this.
Thanks a bunch!!!!
Bill
You should just be able to click on one of the colored rectangles to pop up a window with the View Map button. If that doesn’t work, you might have older version of Google Earth. You can either upgrade to current version of Google Earth, or try holding CTRL or SHIFT (I can’t remember which) when you click on the rectangle. Let me know if this doesn’t fix it for you.
First off, thank you thank you! (I feel bad asking a question so I hope it doesn’t come off as ungrateful!) I’m having with getting the transparency to work right. Right clicking on the map name (the blue underlined map name) the transparency option isn’t there. Expanding the folder there are many icons that I presume are the individual images. They have the transparency option but so far only one did anything and it was just a strip on the right side of the entire map that changed transparency. Is there a way to change the transparency for the entire map at once, rather than individual sections of each map?
Again, thank you for your work!
Whoa, found the answer, and learned a much quicker way to adjust the transparency! – (For anyone challenged like myself, there is a transparency slider is at the bottom of the places window. I’ve always gone into properties of each item by right clicking and so one. Wonder how long that’s been there staring at me…)
First let me thank you for creating these maps–they are great! The one problem is that I just upgraded to GE 5.1 (from 5.0), and now I can’t get the maps to come up at all. Is anyoneelse having this issue, or is there some fix I need to make? Thanks.
I’ve been using 5.1 for a while now. They should work. Try downloading the KML file again from the post.
Yes, that worked–thanks!