How Far Can You Get Away From The Coast In Sweden?

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Recently, I went for a hike in Fulufjället National Park, in Sweden, and I saw Njupeskär (the highest waterfall in Sweden). I stayed in the local town of Särna, to the north-east of the National Park. It was very cold in Särna and I was told that this was because Särna is as far away from the sea as you can get in Sweden. Is that true?

I dusted off my Python module FLFFC and I added a script to calculate the point furthest away from the coast by buffering the GSHHG dataset - the result is plotted below:

Download:
  1. 256 px × 51 px (0.0 Mpx; 20.8 KiB)
  2. 512 px × 102 px (0.1 Mpx; 76.5 KiB)
  3. 1,024 px × 205 px (0.2 Mpx; 279.6 KiB)
  4. 2,048 px × 410 px (0.8 Mpx; 960.9 KiB)
  5. 4,096 px × 819 px (3.4 Mpx; 3.3 MiB)
  6. 8,192 px × 1,638 px (13.4 Mpx; 10.5 MiB)
  7. 10,800 px × 2,160 px (23.3 Mpx; 13.2 MiB)

You can see my hike to Njupeskär in red and the photos that I took in Särna in red too. Looking at the buffered lines created from the higher-resolution datasets, you can see that the town of Särna is slightly less than 210 kilometres away from the coast. The actual furthest location away from the coast is about 223 kilometres and is very close to the entrance to the National Park. The furthest location is the centre of a triangle formed by the inlets at Oslo and Trondheim in Norway and a random place along the coast near Hudiksvall in Sweden.

It is going to require a bit more work to make my new script user-friendly as it is quite computationally expensive currently. This is because in the GSHHG dataset Europe, Asia and Africa are all joined together in one very large Polygon. I think that I will need to find a rough answer quickly and then clip down the dataset before buffering them properly. We will see.