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Articles

Number 1 (2009)

New Meridian Arc Formulas for Sailing Calculations in Navigational GIS

Submitted
August 13, 2013
Published
2009-01-01

Abstract

This paper presents simple compact formulas for the computation of the length of the meridian arc. The proposed alternative formulas are to be primarily used for accurate sailing calculations on the ellipsoid in a GIS environment as in ECDIS and other ECS. Their validity and effectiveness in terms of the accuracy achieved and the CPU time required are assessed and compared to standard geodetic methods. The results of this study show that the proposed formulas are simpler, shorter and more than twice as fast as other geodetic methods of the same accuracy, used for sailing calculations on the ellipsoid, such as “rhumb-line sailing” and “great elliptic sailing”.