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fatiando / boule

Reference ellipsoids for geodesy and geophysics
https://www.fatiando.org/boule
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
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Add centrifugal potential to Ellipsoid and Sphere #182

Closed MarkWieczorek closed 7 months ago

MarkWieczorek commented 7 months ago

This PR allows one to compute the centrifugal potential of a rotating Sphere of Ellipsoid. The equations are simple. For the Ellipsoid class, I used the definition of the prime radius of curvature to compute the perpendicular distance to the rotation axis: $(N(\phi) + h) \cos\phi$, where $\phi$ is geodetic latitude and $h$ is ellipsoidal height.

A separate PR will implement this for triaxial ellipsoids, as we will need to change how we handle longitude_semimajor_axis.

Relevant issues/PRs: Relevant to #151

MarkWieczorek commented 7 months ago

Looking for advice on how to "test" this routine. One possibility would be to check that the centrifugal potential of an ellipsoid with zero flattening is equal to that obtain from the Sphere class.

MarkWieczorek commented 7 months ago

This PR was incorporated into #187