The average latitude of all points on a hemisphere

anglegeometryspheres

I'm looking to calculate the average angular altitude of the sun at noon for everywhere on Earth in order to create a location-agnostic example sun. To start, I would like to calculate what the average latitude is.

Latitudes on a sphere go from 0 to 90 degrees, either North or South, usually with negative numbers representing South. If we included both hemispheres, the average would be zero, so let's only look at one hemisphere. A naïve guess would be that the average is 45 degrees, but by reasoning in my head, there is far less surface area between 45° and 90° than there is between 0° and 45°. However, I have no idea what the formula is to calculate the area of each range of latitudes. The solution would be to solve some formula to find a value X such that 0° to X° has the same area as X° to 90°.

Best Answer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cap

The above article tells us that formula for the surface area of a spherical cap is $A = 2{\pi}r^2(1-cos\theta)$ where $\theta$ is the angle between the pole and the cap's end. In our case we are dealing with latitude, so what we want to eventually get is $90^{\circ} - \theta$.

The surface area of a sphere is $4{\pi}r^2$. We are working with a hemisphere, so we take half this to get $2{\pi}r^2$, and we want to find the point (line) in the middle where the areas are equal, which means we want half of this area, or $A = {\pi}r^2$. We can now form the equation ${\pi}r^2 = 2{\pi}r^2(1-cos\theta)$. We can divide both sides by ${\pi}r^2$ to get $1 = 2(1-cos\theta)$ then we can get $1/2 = 1-cos\theta$ then $1/2 = cos\theta$ then $acos(1/2) = \theta$ then $\theta = 60^{\circ}$.

This means that the average (mean) latitude on a sphere is $90^{\circ} - 60^{\circ}$ or $30^{\circ}$, which answers the stated question in the title. Additionally, to answer my use case, the average sun angular altitude at noon would be the same as the equinox angular altitude at noon, which is $90^{\circ} - latitude$ or $90^{\circ} - 30^{\circ}$ or $60^{\circ}$.

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