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gc_aangle

Finds the acute angle between two great circles on the globe.

Available in version 4.3.1 and later.

Prototype

	function gc_aangle (
		lat  : numeric,  
		lon  : numeric   
	)

	return_val  :  numeric

Arguments

lat
lon

Latitudes and longitudes, in degrees, of vertices. The first two pairs of lat/lon values specify vertices of an arc of one great circle and the second two pairs specify the vertices of the second circle. These can be multi-dimensional arrays, but the rightmost dimension size must be 4 for specifying the vertices of the two arcs. If lat and lon have more than one dimension, then they must agree in number of dimensions and dimension sizes.

Return value

The acute angle, in degrees, between the great circles defined by the arcs as describe above. This will be a non-negative value. If the input arrays are singly dimensioned, then the return value will be a scalar. If the input arrays are multi-dimensional, then the returned array will have one less dimension than the number of dimensions of the input arrays and the dimension sizes of the returned array will agree with those of the input arrays up through their penultimate dimension. The return value will be of type double if either of the input arguments is of type double and type float otherwise.

Description

This function finds the acute angle between two great circles, given two pairs of points on the globe that define two arcs.

Missing values are not honored as such, since it does not make sense to have a vertex specified as a missing value.

See Also

gc_clkwise, gc_dangle, gc_inout, gc_latlon, gc_onarc, gc_pnt2gc, gc_qarea, gc_tarea, nggcog

Examples

Example 1

The following: 

  begin
   aangle = gc_aangle( (/0.0,  0.0, 0.0,  10.0/),    \
                       (/0.0, 10.0, 0.0,   0.0/) )
   print (aangle)
  end
produces:

Variable: aangle
Type: float
Total Size: 4 bytes
            1 values
Number of Dimensions: 1
Dimensions and sizes:   [1]
Coordinates: 
(0)     90
Example 2

The following: 

  begin
    aangle = gc_aangle( (/10.0d, 20.0d, 0.0d,  0.0d/),    \
                        (/ 0.0d,  0.0d, 5.0d, 20.0d/) )
    print (aangle)
  end
produces:

Variable: aangle
Type: double
Total Size: 8 bytes
            1 values
Number of Dimensions: 1
Dimensions and sizes:   [1]
Coordinates: 
(0)     89.99999999999963
Example 3

The following: 

begin
  lat = (/                             \
            (/ 0., 0.,   0., 10.0/) ,  \
            (/22.,40.,  22., 10.0/),   \
            (/10.,20.,   0.,  0.0/)    \
        /)
  lon = (/                             \
            (/ 0.,10.,   0.,  0.0/) ,  \
            (/40.,50.,  40., 30.0/),   \
            (/ 0., 0.,   5., 20.0/)    \
        /)
  angles = gc_aangle(lat, lon)
  print(angles)
end
produces:

Variable: angles
Type: float
Total Size: 12 bytes
            3 values
Number of Dimensions: 1
Dimensions and sizes:   [3]
Coordinates: 
(0)     90
(1)     17.20756
(2)     90