Determine timezone from latitude/longitude without using web services like Geonames.org

Question

is there any possibility to determine the timezone of point (lat/lon) without using webservices? Geonames.org is not stable enough for me to use :( I need this to work in PHP.

Thanks

Answer 1

I had this problem a while back and did exactly what adam suggested:

• Download the database of cities from geonames.org
• convert it to a compact lat/lon -> timezone list
• use an R-Tree implementation to efficiently lookup the nearest city (or rather, its timezone) to a given coordinate

IIRC it took less than 1 second to populate the R-Tree, and it could then perform thousands of lookups per second (both on a 5 year old PC).

Answer 2

How exact do your results have to be? If a rough estimate is enough, calculate the offset yourself:

offset = direction * longitude * 24 / 360 

where direction is 1 for east, -1 for west, and longitude is in (-180,180)