Converting between WGS84 degrees latitude/longitude and meters?

Question

So, I am doing some work with data from an INS unit, in order to calculate the errors in its readings by integrating its velocity data over time to get a change in position, and then comparing that to its actual recorded change in position. The problem is that it gives its position with Latitude and Longitude in degrees (to 11 decimal places), and its documentation indicates that these are using the WGS84 standard, while its velocities are given in meters/second (to 10 decimal places).

I found this other question, but the answers to it were giving answers that assumed that the Earth is a sphere, while the WGS standard uses an ellipsoid, and it seems possible that using calculations that assume that the Earth is spherical might introduce errors into my calculations.

I'm intending to use Python to perform my data analysis with, so ideally answers should use Python as well, but using another language to do the data cleaning would work as long as I can save the cleaned data into a text file that Python can read.

Answer 1

Perhaps you could use LatLon (or for python3 LatLon23), which does enable treating eearth as an ellipsoid.

see an example code using LatLon23 for python3:

from LatLon23 import LatLon, Latitude, Longitude
palmyra = LatLon(Latitude(5.8833), Longitude(-162.0833)) # Location of Palmyra Atoll
honolulu = LatLon(Latitude(21.3), Longitude(-157.8167)) # Location of Honolulu, HI
distance = palmyra.distance(honolulu) # WGS84 distance in km
print(distance)

print(palmyra.distance(honolulu, ellipse = 'sphere')) # FAI distance in km

initial_heading = palmyra.heading_initial(honolulu) # Heading from Palmyra to Honolulu on WGS84 ellipsoid
print(initial_heading)

hnl = palmyra.offset(initial_heading, distance) # Reconstruct Honolulu based on offset from Palmyra
print(hnl.to_string('D')) # Coordinates of Honolulu