UTM (Universal Transversal Mercator projection) is a label for a conformal transverse cylindrical projection of the international Earth ellipsoid between 80 degrees northern and southern latitude derived from the military cartography of the USA and the NATO.
Herewith the Earth is covered by 60 meridian-strip-systems (zones) each with 6 degrees in West-East-direction. Unlike the German Gauss-Krüger System the central meridians of each zone are mapped not length-preserving but are shortened by a reduction factor m0 = 0.9996. Thus in case of the UTM-projection the length-distortion at the border meridians will not be of considerable size (maximum of length-distortion ca. 1.00012) in spite of relatively large width of strip. In a distance of about 180 km at both sides of the central meridian the projection is length-preserving.
By the continuous numeration of the zones and their partition into fields a universal registration grid is created, the so called UTM-grid, to locate points onto maps.
Copyright © Hans-Jürgen Faust, Mainz Germany since 2017
The UPS-system (Universal Polar Stereographic projection) is the completion of the UTM-system at the polar regions. Surface of reference here is also the international Earth ellipsoid.
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Gauss' co-ordinates |
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Gauss-Krüger projection |