Geodesy the ellipsoid varies with latitude, being the longest at the pole and the shortest at the equator as is the nautical mile. A metre was originally defined as the 10-millionth part of the length from equator to North Pole along the meridian through Paris (the target was not quite reached in actual implementation, so that is off by 200 ppm in the current definitions). This means that one kilometre is roughly equal to (1/40,000) * 360 * 60 meridional minutes of arc, which equals 0.54 nautical mile, though this is not exact because the two units are defined on different
Nautical time maritime usage, GMT retains its historical meaning of UT1, the mean "solar" time at Greenwich. UTC, "atomic" time at Greenwich, is too inaccurate, differing by as much as 0.9 seconds from UT1, creating an error of of a minute of longitude at all latitudes and which is at the equator but less at higher latitudes, varying roughly by the cosine of the latitude. However, DUT can be added to UTC to correct it to within 50 milliseconds of UT1, reducing the error to only . In practice, nautical times are used only for radio communication, etc. Aboard the ship, e.g.