How to get correct area calculation using Google Mercator?

Question

i use QGIS with openlayers-plugin and i´ve loaded google satellite as a layer. what i want to do is making a shape-layer (polygon) with the goal to get the area values of the polygons. i´ve activated on-the-fly-transformation and chosen Google Mercator (EPSG:900913) for the project and the shape-layer.

If i compare the values of the measure line tool in qgis with the one in google earth (desktop version) to make a rough estimate, i get two different values. they are same if i activate ellipsoidal on the measure line tool in QGIS. The area calculation takes places with ellipsoidal deactivated, so the area result in the attribute table is wrong. I know that the values of google earth are correct.

Does someone know a way to get an correct area calculation of the polygons?

Answer 1

Google Mercator, like any other Mercator is a Conform projection, which means that it keeps the angles, but distort the areas. In this case as you distance yourself from the equator, the bigger is the distortion.

Google Earth area measure tool is probably auto-correcting that problem, but I'm not sure, and thats why you see those differences.

In QGIS, the best way to precisely measure areas is:

• For big areas, like a continent, use an Equal-area projection:
• For smaller areas, use a suitable local Coordinate System. Each country has generally a few official Coordinate Reference Systems. Those systems, within the area of interest of the country, are generally good to measure both angles and areas, with little distortions. Bigger countries might have different CRS for different regions.

Setting the right CRS to the QGIS Project, with On-the-Fly-Projection, will allow you to "correctly" measure areas using the google layer as background.

Answer 2

This Openlayers Example is using the different measuring controls

Measure Controls (code)

     measureControls = {
            line: new OpenLayers.Control.Measure(
                OpenLayers.Handler.Path, {
                    persist: true,
                    handlerOptions: {
                        layerOptions: {
                            renderers: renderer,
                            styleMap: styleMap
                        }
                    }
                }
            ),
            polygon: new OpenLayers.Control.Measure(
                OpenLayers.Handler.Polygon, {
                    persist: true,
                    handlerOptions: {
                        layerOptions: {
                            renderers: renderer,
                            styleMap: styleMap
                        }
                    }
                }
            )
        };

        var control;
        for(var key in measureControls) {
            control = measureControls[key];
            control.events.on({
                "measure": handleMeasurements,
                "measurepartial": handleMeasurements
            });
            map.addControl(control);
        }


       function toggleControl(element) {
        for(key in measureControls) {
            var control = measureControls[key];
            if(element.value == key && element.checked) {
                control.activate();
            } else {
                control.deactivate();
            }
        }
    }

    function toggleGeodesic(element) {
        for(key in measureControls) {
            var control = measureControls[key];
            control.geodesic = element.checked;
        }
    }

    function toggleImmediate(element) {
        for(key in measureControls) {
            var control = measureControls[key];
            control.setImmediate(element.checked);
        }
    }

http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/measure.html