More about the Univeral Transverse Mercator system

  • UTM measures easting in meters from the zone origin (with a 500km offset)
  • ... and northing in meters from the Equator (with a 10,000km offset in the Southern Hemisphere)
  • UTM allows you to treat individual zones as more or less rectangular
  • (Actually, distances measured within a zone should be scaled by 0.9996 to equalize distortion across the zone)
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