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 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.

If either geometry is empty, the function returns NULL.

Note

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

ST_DistanceSphere

Format: ST_DistanceSphere (A: Geometry)

Return type: Double

Since: v1.4.1

SQL Example

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

Output:

543796.9506134904

SQL Example

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

Output:

544405.4459192449