Difference in elevation gain between routes - why?
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I have planned a cycle route in 20 stages.
Using it as one continuous route by adding stops for each stage the ascent is 19237m.
I have created individual routes for each of the 20 stages the total is 9301m.
The routes on the map are the same.
Why the difference?
Which one is correct?
Thanks -
There will always be differences. The elevation profile is filtered in different ways (smoothed by a curve), so elevation gain is never an exact value. However, the difference you’re seeing — more than double — is unusually large and shouldn’t normally happen. Typically, you might see a variance of up to a few dozen percent, but not over 100%.
The filtering takes into account many parameters, and the total route length is one of them, so there will always be some discrepancy. Calculating elevation gain is not as straightforward as calculating distance, where you can simply sum the distances between all track points — for elevation, filtering is necessary, as I mentioned.
If you could share the route here, we could take a closer look, but without the actual data I can’t give you a more precise answer.