Properties4
| Type | Talk |
| Author | Joris Van den Bossche |
| Date | Feb 25, 2025, 9:15 AM |
| Note created | Feb 25, 2025 |
The earth is not flat! Introducing Spherely and support for spherical geometries in geopandas was a talk given by Joris Van den Bossche at GeoPython 2025. He introduced Spherely, a new engine for spherical geometries in GeoPandas.
When introducing Spherely, he exposed some interesting examples of Mercator breaking an analysis:
- A 500km buffer of all land is very wrong due to distortion,
- A Fiji bounding box does not wrap around the globe,
- Basically everything in Antarctica is broken.
Spherely is based in the s2geometry package for C++, an open-source spherical geometry engine (probably based on S2 somehow?) using bindings to Python. As he explained it: “Spherely: like Shapely, but on the sphere!”
Spherely includes a vectorized interface for NumPy, Pandas. It is early stage of development still:
- It has all geometry types and basic creation functions, as well as imports.
- Basic measurements, basic predicates and overlays,
- As well as constructors (like the convex hull).