Search code examples
rpackagegeospatialdistancelatitude-longitude

Function to calculate geospatial distance between two points (lat,long) using R


I have geocoded points in long, lat format, and I want to calculate the distance between them using R. This seems pretty straight forward, yet I can't find a function that will do it easily. I've been attempting to do it with the gdistance package, but it seems very convoluted and oriented to graphing, I just need a number. Something like distanceBetween(pointA,pointB) that returns a number.


Solution

  • Loading the geosphere package you can use a number of different functions

    library(geosphere)
    distm(c(lon1, lat1), c(lon2, lat2), fun = distHaversine)
    

    Also:

    distHaversine()
    distMeeus()
    distRhumb()
    distVincentyEllipsoid()
    distVincentySphere()
    

    ...