Vincenty

DanPatterson_Retired · ‎01-24-2017

Distance calculations using longitude and latitude on the ellipsoid. Haversine or Vincenty?

The choice depends on the resolution needed. This thread on Computing Distances reminded me that I had the latter kicking around and Bruce Harold's Reverse Geocoding uses it. See Simon Kettle's blog post as well,

So I thought I would throw the reference in the Py..Links so I/we don't forget.

The code can be found on my GitHub link but I have attached a copy to this post.

I spared no effort in code verbosity and I tried to remain faithful to Chris Veness's documentation and presentation of the original code implementation. His page contains an interactive calculator implemented in Java if you just need a few calculations. I have included a few sample calculations here should you be interested

:Examples:
: long0  lat0  long1  lat1   dist       initial    final  head to
: -75.0, 45.0, -75.0, 46.0   111141.548   0.000,   0.000   N
: -75.0, 46.0, -75.0, 45.0   111141.548 180.000, 180.000   S
: -76.0, 45.0, -75.0, 45.0    78846.334  89.646,  90.353   E
: -75.0, 45.0, -76.0, 45.0    78846.334 270.353, 269.646   W
: -76.0, 46.0, -75.0, 45.0   135869.091 144.526, 145.239   SE
: -75.0, 46.0, -76.0, 45.0   135869.091 215.473, 214.760   SW
: -76.0, 45.0, -75.0, 46.0   135869.091  34.760,  35.473   NE
: -75.0, 45.0, -76.0, 46.0   135869.091 325.239, 324.526   NW
: -90.0,  0.0    0.0   0.0 10018754.171  90.000   90.000   1/4 equator
: -75.0   0.0  -75.0  90.0 10001965.729   0.000    0.000   to N pole
:‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

So use Bruce's if you need to geocode... use Chris's if you just need a few points.... or play with this incarnation should you need to incorporate a function in your own code. I will get around to converting it to NumPy eventually so one can process large sets of origin-destinations that need a tad more than a spherical estimate. The current version of the program uses iteration which makes it a poor candidate for vectorization on arrays, but there are other implementations one can use.

The most recent version of vincenty.py can be found on my github repository numpy_samples/vincenty.py at master · Dan-Patterson/numpy_samples · GitHub