ST_DistanceSphere

Introduction: Return the haversine / great-circle distance of A using a given earth radius (default radius: 6371008.0). Unit is meter. Works better for large geometries (country level) compared to ST_Distance + ST_Transform. It is equivalent to PostGIS ST_Distance(geography, use_spheroid=false) and ST_DistanceSphere function and produces nearly identical results. It provides faster but less accurate result compared to ST_DistanceSpheroid.

Geometry must be in EPSG:4326 (WGS84) projection and must be in lon/lat order. You can use ST_FlipCoordinates to swap lat and lon. For non-point data, we first take the centroids of both geometries and then compute the distance.

Note

By default, this function uses lon/lat order since v1.5.0. Before, it used lat/lon order.

Format: ST_DistanceSphere (A: Geometry)

Since: v1.4.1

Example 1:

SELECT ST_DistanceSphere(ST_GeomFromWKT('POINT (-0.56 51.3168)'), ST_GeomFromWKT('POINT (-3.1883 55.9533)'))

Output:

543796.9506134904

Example 2:

SELECT ST_DistanceSphere(ST_GeomFromWKT('POINT (-0.56 51.3168)'), ST_GeomFromWKT('POINT (-3.1883 55.9533)'), 6378137.0)

Output:

544405.4459192449