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Topex Interactive

Created: January 2022 · Demo released: June 2022

Topex is a platform developed by the University of California, San Diego that lets you extract topography and gravity data over the internet. It's an incredibly useful geoscience tool — but the platform returns raw plain text, making it cumbersome to select an area of interest, preview results, or do anything beyond copy-pasting numbers into another tool.

I decided to fix that, so I built Topex Interactive: a user interface and backend API layer that wraps the UCSD platform and makes it significantly more convenient to use.

⚠️ The backend is currently closed/not publicly hosted.

The Problem

The original UCSD Topex endpoint returns data like this:

-120.00 35.00 1234.56
-119.99 35.00 1235.10
-119.98 35.00 1234.87
...

Plain text. No previewing the area on a map, no structured format, no easy way to filter or visualize your selection before downloading a massive dataset.

What I Built

Backend API

A proxy API that:

Accepts structured JSON requests (latitude/longitude bounding box, data type)
Calls the original UCSD endpoint internally
Parses the plain-text response and returns clean JSON
Built in C# (.NET)

Repository: luthfiyufajjiru/TopexDownloaderAPI

User Interface

An interactive web app that:

Lets you draw your area of interest on a map
Submits the bounding box coordinates to the backend API
Displays and allows you to download the structured results
Built in JavaScript

Repository: luthfiyufajjiru/topex-interactive

Stack

Layer	Technology
Backend API	C# (.NET)
Frontend UI	JavaScript
Original Data Source	UCSD Topex
Hosting	Firebase Hosting