How do I add Latitude and Longitude fields to my template and have them used to create a Fence plot/Cross Section?

As the Title says. We have a fairly large project and I would like to create a Fence diagram that allows us to quickly compare elevations of the various different strata of soils. Our normal template does not have a Latitude and Longitude field in the "Borehole" Input tab. I would like to add this to our normal template/Library so that it is available for all future projects. How should I go about doing this? How do I make sure that these new fields are referenced for the Fence Diagram?

Things I have tried so Far:

  • Going to "tables" > "Coordinate Fields". this added a Latitude and Longitude to the table like I wanted, however, when I went to "Output" > "Fence" and clicked on "Site Layout" a message pops up that says "No Points available for plotting. All Points were lacking coordinates and/or elevations" Even though I do have elevation, Latitude, and Longitude information entered in for several borings.
  • Going to "Tables" > "Add Field" and then adding a Field to the Table called Latitude and Longitude using the Latitude and Longitude "type" of field. When I tried the same as described above, it still didn't read the latitudes correctly.

Thanks in Advance,

-Taylor

  • The fence reports should be referencing the fields "north" and "east". If you don't see them, you may need to unhide them using menu tables>show or hide fields. These fields are typically in units of feet or meters. You can put lat/long in as decimal values and they should display proportionally correct for purposes of creating fences, but the scale units will not be correct

  • The reason the borings do not display is that the fence reports look at the Point.north and Point.east fields by default.  Since these fields do not contain any values, gINT does not know how to position the borings.  You could simply enter the latitude into the north field and the longitude into the east field as suggested but that can lead to miss managed data.  Since you already have the latitude and longitude fields added to your data base, all you need to do is to tell the fence report what fields to use to locate the borings. Do this as follows.

    In the reporte editor, make a copy of the desired fence report and give it a new name (you do not have to do this but it keeps the original report intact in case you are using it for other projects that have coordinate data (north and east)

    In the new report, select File, Page, Properties (or [f8]).  This brings up the properties dialog for the report.  Select the Data Sources tab. 

    In the point east expression enter the field storing the longitude (probably <<Point.Longitude>>)

    In the point north expression enter the field storing  the latitude (Probably <<Point.Latitude>>)

    This assumes that your latitude and longitude are entered as a decimal degree in a single field each and the West longitude is negative (Example: -94.345678)

    The new report will now use the latitude and longitude to position the borings horizontally with respect to each other.  However this is not quite what you want as the latitude and longitude are in degrees rather than feet.  Further the distance in the x direction is not equal to the distance in the y direction depending on your latitude.  To solve this you need to convert the latitude and longitude into feet.  You could use a rigorous coordinate conversion program such as CORPSCON or many other programs but an approximate method uses the following formulas (there are more accurate formulas available if you want but these are usually close enough)

    North = Latitude[364612.44 ft/deg - 1836.69 ft/deg * (cos( 2 * Latitude))]

    East = Longitude [ 365220.59 ft/deg * cos( Latitude)]

    in gINT this would look something like

    <<Calc(<<Point.latitude>>*(364612.44-1836.69*<<cos(2*<<Point.Latitude>>)>>))>>

    and

    <<Calc(<<Point.longitude>>*(365220.59*<<cos(<<Point.Latitude>>)>>))>>

    I may have missed a parenthesis or delimiter but you get the idea.

    Place these formulas in the point north expression and point east expression and gINT will position the borings horizontally based on feet. The actual numbers the formula generates are meaningless (well not totally meaningless; the north is the distance from the boring to the equator in feet and the east is the distance from the boring to the prime meridian in feet) They are not exact because they are based on instantaneous values of feet/deg but they will position the borings relative to each other with sufficient accuracy over the range of latitude and longitude on a typical project. The accuracy is probably about 0.1' over a square mile project.

    Remember that latitude and longitude need to be entered to the 6th decimal place in order to be accurate to the nearest 0.4' (Example -94.123456)

    circumference of the earth = 24900 miles = 131472000 ft

    131472000 ft / 360 deg *0.000001 = 0.36 ft

    Hope this helps.