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Return the haversine / great-circle distance of A using a given earth radius (default radius: 6371008.0). Unit is meter. Compared to ST_Distance + ST_Transform, it works better for datasets that cover large regions such as continents or the entire planet. It is equivalent to PostGIS ST_Distance(geography, use_spheroid=false) and ST_DistanceSphere function and produces nearly identical results. It provides faster but less accurate result compared to ST_DistanceSpheroid. Geometry must be in EPSG:4326 (WGS84) projection and must be in ==lon/lat== order. You can use ==ST_FlipCoordinates== to swap lat and lon. For non-point data, we first take the centroids of both geometries and then compute the distance.
By default, this function uses lon/lat order since v1.5.0. Before, it used lat/lon order.
ST_DistanceSphere

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Signatures

ST_DistanceSphere (A: Geometry)

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Parameters

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A
Geometry
required
The input geometry.

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Return type

A numeric value.

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Examples

SELECT ST_DistanceSphere(ST_GeomFromWKT('POINT (-0.56 51.3168)'), ST_GeomFromWKT('POINT (-3.1883 55.9533)'))

543796.9506134904

SELECT ST_DistanceSphere(ST_GeomFromWKT('POINT (-0.56 51.3168)'), ST_GeomFromWKT('POINT (-3.1883 55.9533)'), 6378137.0)

544405.4459192449