[postgis-users] day length calculation

[Brent Wood]

Hi David,

That's much more elegant than my way :-)

Note that the geom in these statements is assumed to be a point, so for
polygons it would expand to someting like centroid(geom).

Cheers,

  Brent


--- David William Bitner <david.bitner at gmail.com> wrote:

> CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION daylength(real, int)
>   RETURNS double precision AS
> 'select 24*(ACOS(1-(1-TAN(radians($1))*TAN(.409088 * COS(.0172024 *
> int))))/PI());'
>   LANGUAGE 'sql' VOLATILE;
> 
> usage:
> select daylength(latitude,dayofyear)
> 
> so if you have a geometry column and a day of year column...
> select daylength(Y(geom),dayofyear) from your table;
> 
> If you want it to just take a date instead of dayofyear, you could use this:
> 
> CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION daylength(real, date)
>   RETURNS double precision AS
> 'select 24*(ACOS(1-(1-TAN(radians($1))*TAN(.409088 * COS(.0172024 *
> extract(doy from $2)))))/PI());'
>   LANGUAGE 'sql' VOLATILE;
> 
> I pulled these equations from here:
> http://dc.metblogs.com/archives/2006/12/the_longest_nig.phtml
> 
> 
> David
> 
> On 1/26/07, Kirk Wythers <kwythers at umn.edu> wrote:
> >
> > I am looking for ideas to add a daylength calculation to a postgis
> > database. The database in question has a table named "sites", which
> > contains lat, lon, and geometry info for a number of locations. A
> > second table contains climate data including a day_of_the_year column.
> >
> > I would like to add the capability to calculate the length of each
> > day (could be done as a view or another table). The equation for day
> > length calculation takes as input day_of_the_year and latitude, does
> > some trig (uses acos, tan, cos, radians, and pi) and spits out an
> > estimate of the day length in hours.
> >
> > How would folks recommend I approach this problem?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Kirk
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> >
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> ************************************
> David William Bitner
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