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Height above mean sea level is a measure of a location's vertical distance (height, elevation or altitude) in reference to a vertical datum based on a historic mean sea level. In geodesy, it is formalized as orthometric height. The zero level varies in different countries due to different reference points and historic measurement periods.
Height above mean sea level (AMSL) is the elevation (on the ground) or altitude (in the air) of an object, relative to a reference datum for mean sea level (MSL). It is also used in aviation, where some heights are recorded and reported with respect to mean sea level (contrast with flight level ), and in the atmospheric sciences , and in land ...
This is as opposed to altitude/elevation above mean sea level (AMSL), or (in broadcast engineering) height above average terrain (HAAT). In other words, these expressions (AGL, AMSL, HAAT) indicate where the "zero level" or "reference altitude" is located.
The most common and convenient datum which is internationally accepted is mean sea level which is a universal measure and based upon a common base line in the whole world determined by earth's gravitational model (see geoid) that gives the standard to measure elevation of a place above or below mean sea level.
Since NGVD 29 used a simple model of gravity based on latitude to calculate the geoid and did not take into account other variations, [citation needed] elevation difference between points in a local area in it and NAVD 88 will show negligible change from one datum to the other, even though the elevation of both does change between datums.
AMSL is an acronym for "Above Mean Sea Level", the elevation of a location above a standardized sea level. AMSL may also refer to: Alberta Major Soccer League, a Canadian soccer league; Airbus Military Sociedad Limitada, a former aerospace company based in Spain; Aéroport Montréal Saint-Hubert Longueuil, a Canadian airport
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The First Geodetic Levelling of England and Wales (1840–1860) needed to define a datum plane from which to specify spot heights. At first it was specified as a horizontal plane 100 feet below an arbitrary benchmark on St John's Church, Liverpool. Subsequently, however, it was redefined as mean sea level (MSL).