Skip to content
Prev 22496 / 29559 Next

Help with latlong to UTM conversion when UTM zones are different

If you have lat-long data that crosses two UTM zones then its
generally okay to just pick *one* and transform all the points to
that. Use the one that has the most points in. Basically use the UTM
zones as guidelines to pick one UTM zone coordinate system. Unless
your data spans several zones and you want quite high accuracy of
distance measurements. Some points bleeding over into an adjacent zone
are no problem.

All projections are approximations to the earth's spheroid, so points
that are within a single UTM zone have some distortion in their
distance or angle relationships. Transforming points that are within
an adjacent UTM zone is just an extension of that distortion. You can
compute the precise distance error if you want for the furthest points
by comparing with the geodesic distance.

Alternatively you might find there is a coordinate system that spans
your dataset nicely - often when a country or an island or a region
crosses UTM zones there is an official coordinate system defined that
is used by the authorities there.

Also alternatively, there's nothing to stop you defining a transverse
mercator system based on the centre of your data.

Barry
On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 7:44 AM, moses selebatso <selebatsom at yahoo.co.uk> wrote: