How to calculate the area of a polygon on the earth's surface using python?

Question

The title basically says it all. I need to calculate the area inside a polygon on the Earth\'s surface using Python. Calculating area enclosed by arbitrary polygon on Earth&

Answer 1

Here is a solution that uses basemap, instead of pyproj and shapely, for the coordinate conversion. The idea is the same as suggested by @sgillies though. NOTE that I've added the 5th point so that the path is a closed loop.

import numpy
from mpl_toolkits.basemap import Basemap

coordinates=numpy.array([
[-102.05, 41.0], 
[-102.05, 37.0], 
[-109.05, 37.0], 
[-109.05, 41.0],
[-102.05, 41.0]])

lats=coordinates[:,1]
lons=coordinates[:,0]

lat1=numpy.min(lats)
lat2=numpy.max(lats)
lon1=numpy.min(lons)
lon2=numpy.max(lons)

bmap=Basemap(projection='cea',llcrnrlat=lat1,llcrnrlon=lon1,urcrnrlat=lat2,urcrnrlon=lon2)
xs,ys=bmap(lons,lats)

area=numpy.abs(0.5*numpy.sum(ys[:-1]*numpy.diff(xs)-xs[:-1]*numpy.diff(ys)))
area=area/1e6

print area

The result is 268993.609651 in km^2.