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from long/lat to UTM

On 10-Mar-05 Sander Oom wrote:
While there is a longitude-based "nominal" time-zone
structure (0deg E is the centre of Zone 0 which extends
for 7.5deg either side; successive time-zones move round
by 15deg), this does not apply cleanly to the time-shifts
adopted in different places for local time.

A World map of regions with different local-time offsets
is a crazy patchwork, with all sorts of contradictory
looking regions. For instance, the "-0700" region of
the USA extends from approx -0830 to approx -0620,
covering over 2 hours, and parts of "-0800" touch the
-0700 line and are more than 0100 East of parts of "-0700".
Even worse can be found over the Indian/Central Asian
and Malaysian parts of the world, where time-shifts
of 30 miniutes are also frequent (and, according to my
Atlas, one country, Nepal, has "5&2/3" i.e. +0540!).

As Sander says, "Not sure where you would derive the time zone!".

Unless you can refer a (long,lat) position to a look-up
table, you can't predict what the zone will be to less
the 1 hour (except of course for the "nominal" time-zones
by 15deg sectors). I've never encountered a "digital"
version of such a table (my Atlas must be based on one,
though).

Best wishes,
Ted.
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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk>
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861
Date: 10-Mar-05                                       Time: 09:47:25
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