The area enclosed within a figure can be computed by coordinates. This is done by forming trapezoids and determining their areas.
Trapezoids are formed by the abscissas of the corners. Ordinates at the corners provide the altitudes of the trapezoids. A sketch of the figure will aid in the computations.
This is similar to the double meridian distance method but does not use meridian distances. For land area calculations following a boundary traverse, the DMD method for area is more commonly used. The DMD method will not be discussed here.
A B C b h