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

72
votes

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.

2
rpackagegeospatialdistancelatitude-longitude
See spDistsN1() function in sp package. – user3710546
Thanks Pascal that worked! – SteveO7
Did you see the answer from Jaap at stackoverflow.com/a/23095329/2514568? – Andy Clifton

2 Answers

98
votes

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()

...

23
votes

Agree with @PereG on answer above, but think that the order of latitude and longitude is the other way around: lon, lat. This will affect your results for distance matrix. So correct is:

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

Source: ftp://cran.r-project.org/pub/R/web/packages/geosphere/geosphere.pdf