Best way to calculate distance between geographical points
In the geosphere package on R-Forge there are a number of distance functions (from law of cosines to more complex) as well as related spherical trig functions, such as computing paths along a great-circle. There is also pointDistance in the raster package. Robert
On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 1:27 AM, Karl Ove Hufthammer <karl at huftis.org> wrote:
Dear list members I have found three functions for calculating the distance between geographical points, 'geo.dist' in the 'oce' package, 'rdist.earth' in the 'fields' package, and 'spDistsN1' in the 'sp' package. They all give slightly difference answers, so my question is: which of them is best, i.e., gives the most accurate answer? When it comes to performance, the 'rbenchmark' package shows that (at least on calculating a single distance), 'spDistsN1' is the fastest, 'geo.dist' takes twice as long, and 'rdist.earth' takes about five times as long (as 'spDistsN1'). -- Karl Ove Hufthammer
_______________________________________________ R-sig-Geo mailing list R-sig-Geo at stat.math.ethz.ch https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-geo