Simple calculations for working with lat/lon and km distance?

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The approximate conversions are:

  • Latitude: 1 deg = 110.574 km
  • Longitude: 1 deg = 111.320*cos(latitude) km

This doesn’t fully correct for the Earth’s polar flattening – for that you’d probably want a more complicated formula using the WGS84 reference ellipsoid (the model used for GPS). But the error is probably negligible for your purposes.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latitude

Caution: Be aware that latlong coordinates are expressed in degrees, while the cos function in most (all?) languages typically accepts radians, therefore a degree to radians conversion is needed.

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