3 ms·
For a lot of use cases, the error in using the spherical approximation is small enough that it doesn’t matter. For instance, measuring distance between two poin
by pmiller2 8y ago
For a lot of use cases, the error in using the spherical approximation is small enough that it doesn’t matter. For instance, measuring distance between two points in the same city, you can happily use the shorter function and not worry about it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- thibautg 8y agoMost GIS applications have this functionality (distance on ellipsoid) built-it. For local distance measuring it is generally better and easier to use a projected coordinates system (where units are meters/miles instead of degrees). But if you are using a software without GIS functions (excel?) and only have a dataset with lat/long coordinates, then it is easier to use the short formula ;-)