ST_DistanceSphere

Introduction: Return the haversine / great-circle distance of A using a given earth radius (default radius: 6371008.0). Unit is meter. Compared to ST_Distance + ST_Transform, it works better for datasets that cover large regions such as continents or the entire planet. 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 lat/lon 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.

Format: ST_DistanceSphere (A:geometry)

SQL example 1:

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

Output: 543796.9506134904

SQL example 2:

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

Output: 544405.4459192449