Module ellipsoidalVincenty

Ellipsoidal, Vincenty-based geodesy.

Thaddeus Vincenty's geodetic (lat-/longitude) LatLon, geocentric (ECEF) Cartesian and VincentyError classes and functions areaOf, intersections2, nearestOn and perimeterOf.

Pure Python implementation of geodesy tools for ellipsoidal earth models, transcoded from JavaScript originals by (C) Chris Veness 2005-2024 and published under the same MIT Licence**, see Vincenty geodesics. More at geographiclib and GeoPy.

Calculate geodesic distance between two points using the Vincenty formulae and one of several ellipsoidal earth models. The default model is WGS-84, the most widely used globally-applicable model for the earth ellipsoid.

Other ellipsoids offering a better fit to the local geoid include Airy (1830) in the UK, Clarke (1880) in Africa, International 1924 in much of Europe, and GRS-67 in South America. North America (NAD83) and Australia (GDA) use GRS-80, which is equivalent to the WGS-84 model.

Great-circle distance uses a spherical model of the earth with the mean earth radius defined by the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) as (2 * a + b) / 3 = 6371008.7714150598 or about 6,371,009 meter (for WGS-84, resulting in an error of up to about 0.5%).

Here's an example usage of ellipsoidalVincenty:

>>> from pygeodesy.ellipsoidalVincenty import LatLon
>>> Newport_RI = LatLon(41.49008, -71.312796)
>>> Cleveland_OH = LatLon(41.499498, -81.695391)
>>> Newport_RI.distanceTo(Cleveland_OH)
866,455.4329158525  # meter

To change the ellipsoid model used by the Vincenty formulae use:

>>> from pygeodesy import Datums
>>> from pygeodesy.ellipsoidalVincenty import LatLon
>>> p = LatLon(0, 0, datum=Datums.OSGB36)

or by converting to anothor datum:

>>> p = p.toDatum(Datums.OSGB36)