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Intersections of Great Circles

Authors
Affiliations
NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research
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Intersections of Great Circles


Overview

A great circle path crosses the entire planet and as a result, any two (valid) great circle paths will always intersect at exactly two points around the globe.

In this notebook, we will:

  1. Find the intersection of two great circle paths

Prerequisites

ConceptsImportanceNotes
NumpyNecessaryUsed to work with large arrays
PandasNecessaryUsed to read in and organize data (in particular dataframes)
Intro to CartopyHelpfulWill be used for adding maps to plotting
MatplotlibHelpfulWill be used for plotting
  • Time to learn: 30 minutes


Imports

  • Import Packages

  • Setup location dataframe with coordinates

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Find the intersection of two great circle paths

The intersection of two great circle paths always exists at two positions on the globe.

Math of intersection

We can determine the intersections of two great circle paths as a the normal of two planes containing the great circles. Where the two planes intersect will represent the intersections on the surface of the globe.

First, we find the cross product of the vectors for the position’s cartesian coordinates. Then, we find the cross product of the two normal planes. This will result in two intersection points, one for each side of the planet.

Intersection points for Great Circle Arc A (Boulder to Boston) an B (Greenwich to Cairo) = [(42.138337079673235, -92.35895410223662), (-42.138337079673235, 87.64104589776339)]

Plot Intersections with Great Circle Paths

The intersection points will be easier to understand when plotted on a map, so let’s plot the two great circle paths and highlight where they intersect.

<Figure size 1500x1000 with 2 Axes>
<Figure size 1500x1000 with 2 Axes>

Summary

In this notebook, we determined the position where two great circle paths interact on the globe.

What’s next?

Next, we will calculate the internal angles associated with multiple great circles.

Resources and references