How do you calculate how far you've climbed?

[OakLeaf]

The Garmin Edge series has a barometric altimeter, software corrected against known locations, and are considered the most accurate bike computers on the market. Barometric is WAY more accurate than GPS points, just because of the nature of the triangulation from satellites high above the ground, and with the correction against known points, it eliminates some (but not all!) of the inaccuracies that come from air pressure variations.

The software programs I mentioned, MotionBased (online) and SportTracks (downloadable) add another level of correction to uploaded GPS data. MotionBased does tend to overestimate, it seems. SportTracks has my confidence mainly because it (1) reliably corrects distances on the occasions when there's a problem with my GPS; (2) gives elevation figures in flat terrain that seem pretty reasonable, when everything else will really overestimate just because of little pressure variations of a foot or two at a time; (3) usually matches total ascent and descent pretty closely for a ride that starts and ends in the same place; and (4) can vary in either direction from my raw 705 numbers rather than consistently being higher or lower.

Just looking at topo maps, as you point out, is probably reasonably close for long steady climbs and descents, but in rolling terrain, most of the climbing won't even register on a topo map that's laid out in 200 foot contour lines. Surely yours must be narrower than 100 meters!? In areas where the climbs are short but very steep, like Ohio, climbs of 150 foot (50 m) gain at over 10% grade surely do count in your legs. So it depends on where you are I suppose.


ETA: for real-time grade, there's a very low-tech bubble level type of device in the Adventure Cycling catalog. It doesn't store data obviously, but for just glancing down and seeing how steep the hill is that you're climbing at the moment, you don't get any more accurate than a gravity-based device!