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

r package geospatial distance latitude-longitude
SteveO7 picture SteveO7 · Sep 3, 2015 · Viewed 94.9k times · Source

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.

Answer

PereG picture PereG · Sep 3, 2015

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()

...

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