Category: | Miscellaneous |
Author/Contact Info | Chuck Charbeneau (cacharbe) ccharbeneau@lear.com |
Description: | A while back my younger sister asked me to help her with homework from her college trig course. She had to solve a Great Circle Distance problem. After showing her the steps, it got me to thinking, and then reading, and then finally coding. What I found was quite interesting, and from that research spawned an application to find the distances between to corporate locations from their zip codes that I implemented on our intranet. There are actually a couple of different methods for determining the distance between 2 long/lat pairs and you need to be aware of the accuracy of each. The Great Circle method is the least accurate IIRC, but is the most accessible, as it is a part of Math::Trig. I wrote some code to do this using the various methods. As I mentioned, it finds the distances between two zip codes for which the long/lat pairs are known, but I've removed the database interface for brevity and just given the pertinent code. You should also read: this, this and (my favorite) this article. I was pretty explicit in my code so that my non-programming sister could understand it when I showed it too her to explain the different algorithms, but I think it gets the point across. C-. |
use strict; use Math::Trig qw(deg2rad pi great_circle_distance asin acos); ############################ ## Distances are in Miles ## ############################ my ($lat1, $long1); my ($lat2, $long2); print "Haversine : ". &Haversine($lat1, $long1, $lat2, $long2) ."\n" +; print "Law Cosines : ". &LawCosines($lat1, $long1, $lat2, $long2)."\n" +; print "Flat-Earth : ". &FlatEarth($lat1, $long1, $lat2, $long2) ."\n" +; print "Great Circle: ". &GreatCircle($lat1, $long1, $lat2, $long2)."\n +"; sub LawCosines { my ($lat1, $long1, $lat2, $long2) = @_; my $r=3956; my $dist = acos(sin(deg2rad($lat1))* sin(deg2rad($lat2))+ cos(deg2rad($lat1))* cos(deg2rad($lat2))* cos(deg2rad($long2)- deg2rad($long1))) * $r; return $dist; } sub FlatEarth { my ($lat1, $long1, $lat2, $long2) = @_; my $r=3956; my $a = (pi/2)- deg2rad($lat1); my $b = (pi/2)- deg2rad($lat2); my $c = sqrt($a**2 + $b**2 - 2 * $a *$b *cos(deg2rad($long2)-deg2rad($long1))); my $dist = $c * $r; return $dist; } sub Haversine { my ($lat1, $long1, $lat2, $long2) = @_; my $r=3956; $dlong = deg2rad($long1) - deg2rad($long2); $dlat = deg2rad($lat1) - deg2rad($lat2); $a = sin($dlat/2)**2 +cos(deg2rad($lat1)) * cos(deg2rad($lat2)) * sin($dlong/2)**2; $c = 2 * (asin(sqrt($a))); $dist = $r * $c; return $dist; } sub GreatCircle { my ($lat1, $long1, $lat2, $long2) = @_; my $r=3956; my @zip1 = (deg2rad($long1), deg2rad(90-$lat1)); my @zip2 = (deg2rad($long2), deg2rad(90-$lat2)); my $dist = great_circle_distance(@zip1, @zip2,$r); return $dist; } |
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Replies are listed 'Best First'. | |
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•Re: Finding the Distance between longitude and latitude pairs
by merlyn (Sage) on Mar 07, 2002 at 19:24 UTC | |
by cacharbe (Curate) on Mar 07, 2002 at 19:56 UTC |