If you ever flew in a plane, you probably realized that the plane took a curved path instead of a straight path (if you were looking at a flat map). This is because on a sphere, the shortest distance between two points is along a great circle. This is more obvious when you plot the straight and curved paths on a flat map (which uses the Mercator projection) and on a sphere.
You can calculate the length of the curved path using the haversine formula. Between two points on the Earth $(\phi_1, \lambda_1)$ and $(\phi_2, \lambda_2)$ where $\phi$ is latitude and $\lambda$ is longitude, the shortest distance is $$ 2R \arcsin \sqrt{ \sin^2 \left( \frac{\phi_2 - \phi_1}{2} \right) + \cos\phi_1 \cos\phi_2 \sin^2 \left( \frac{\lambda_2 - \lambda_1}{2} \right)} $$ where $R$ = 6372.1 km is the radius of the Earth.
Input: (Latitude, longitude) coordinates of two points. Latitudes go from -90 to +90. Longitudes go from -180 to +180. Remember to convert your angles from degrees to radians before using the sine and cosine functions!
Output: The distance between the points in kilometers (km).
Example
| Difficulty | Timesink | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Function | haversine_distance(lat1, lon1, lat2, lon2) | ||
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