Re: Calculating a Distance on the Surface of the Earth

O.B. wrote:
I've managed to summarize the problem I'm trying to solve in the PDF
below. Basically, I have a point on the earth's surface at a given
latitude and longitude. If I moved 200km away from this point to the
East, I'd actually be above the surface of the earth due to the
curvature of the earth. If at the point, I were to drop straight down
to the surface of the earth, I'd like to know the distance between
this new point on the earth and the original point. I'd like to
repeat this calculation with heading 200km to the North. Help?

http://www.dafunks.com/misc/EllipseProblem.pdf

O.B.

I am not sure I understand what you want to calculate. I can provide you with a PDF of a paper by T. Vincenty in which he published algorithms that will allow you to:

1.
Given: The latitude/longitude of a point on the earth's surface and the distance and direction to a second point, compute the latitude and longitude of the second point.

2.
Given: The latitude and longitude of two points on the earth's surface, compute the distance between the points and the azimuths of each point from the other.

If this is helpful I would be glad to send you the paper.

Vic
.

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