Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Urban Studies and Planning 11.520: A Workshop on Geographic Information Systems 11.188: Urban Planning and Social Science Laboratory Lecture 3: More GIS Principles & Methods: Projections and Coordinate Systems September 21, 2005, Joseph Ferreira, Jr. (including contributions from Visiting Prof. Zhong-Ren Peng who taught the class in Fall of 2003) Administrative notes: • Homework set #1 posted online today, due in 2 weeks • Lab Exercises #1: due today • Lab Exercise #2: due next Monday (at the start of the Lab) Today's Topics: • Elements of the Map o Map scale, symbology o Classification and thematic shading • Map projections • Vector & Raster data models Elements of the Map ScaleRatio Scale, 1:10,000, or 1:100,000 or 1/100,000 Verbal Scale: One inch represents 2,000 feet (1:24,000). One centimeter represents 20 kilometers (1:2,000,000) Printout vs. onscreen: 10 foot pixel + 72 pixels per inch onscreen ==> One inch represents 720 feet (1:8,600) - But some screens have higher/lower pixel densities; not all screens have square pixels; also, screendump to printer will change scale since printer will have different dot-density than the screen Beware! Good GIS software will try to match screen and printer properties to software settings so screen and printouts will show appropriate scale and show correct scalebars. For the scale to be meaningful, display units and hardware choices must be properly identified. Large Scale or Small Scale In general, Large scale: >= 1:24,000 (good for *small* area representation - city block)Small scale: <= 1:500,000 (good for *large* area representation - metro area) But scale is relative, depends on the applications. Large-scale maps are more detailed than small-scale maps. Typical Scales Used In Metric System: 1:10,000 or 1:25,000 1:50,000 1:100,000 In American System: 1:9,600 (one inch represents 800 feet) 1:24,000 (one inch represents 2000 feet) 1:62,500 (one inch represents (slightly less than) one mile) Six Principal Visual VariablesUse contrasting symbols to portray geographic differences For qualitative differences Use shape, texture and hue (e.g., land use types). For quantitative differences Use size to show variation in amount or count (e.g., population, No. of crime),Use graytone or hue to show differences in ratio or intensity (e.g., proportion of household in poverty, population density). Southern New England Counties • Thematic mapping - simplest display of spatially varying phenomenao Note use of ArcMap 'help files' regarding thematic map types & classification choices o Different classification schemes:  Equal Interval  Natural Breaks  Quantile  Standard Deviation o Number of classes, color scheme, etc. o Normalization: Why do we care? o Exclusion options: no data vs. zero value • Layouts: Features of a good map (lots more to good cartography - see references) o Title, Legend, Scale Bar, North Arrow, Data sources, o Your name or organization o Other feature labels and annotations Projections Geographic Reference System: Latitude and Longitude Axis: the center of earth rotation. Equator: The plane through the center of mass perpendicular to the axis. Longitude: lines slicing the earth parallel to the axis, and perpendicular to the plane of equator. The line goes through Greenwich has 0 longitude. Range from 0 to 360 degrees, or 180 degree west (-) to 180 degree east (+). LatitudeLatitude is defined based on ellipsoid representing the shape of the earth. See: Prof. Peter Dana's notes on projections and coordinate systems (U. of Colorado) http://www.colorado.edu/geography/gcraft/notes/coordsys/coordsys_f.html<Click the images below to enlarge...> WG84 (the World Geodetic System of 1984) is a standard ellipsoid. In North America, the most recent ellipsoid data it is called the North American Datum of 1983 (NAD83) (the earlier version is NAD27). Latitude definition:A line drawn through a point of interest perpendicular to the ellipsoid at that location, the angle made by this line with the plane of Equator is the latitude of that point. Ranges from 90 degree south (-) to 90 degree north (+). What do Latitude and Longitude mean? Two points on the same longitude, separated by one degree of latitude are 1/360 of the circumference of earth apart, or about 111 km apart. One minute latitude is 1.86 km. One second latitude is 30 m. For the same latitude, one minute of longitude separation corresponds to different distances depending on the latitude (111 km at equator, nothing at the poles!). Nowadays, latitude/longitude often expressed in decimal degrees. Distance calculation using latitude and longitude  Latitude -90≤Ø≤90  Longitude -180≤λ≤180  Arc distance between two points on the earth surface (spherical):  Rcos-1[sinØ1sinØ2+cosØ1cosØ2cos(λ1-λ2)]  R is the radius of the spherical earth Cartesian Coordinate System Assign two coordinates to every point on a flat surface. Map Projections  Map projections transform the curved, 3-D surface of the planet into a flat, 2-D plane. Note, that Map projections distort map scale in various ways  Transform a position on the Earth’s surface identified by latitude and longitude (Ø, λ) into a position in Cartesian coordinates (x, y).  x = f (Ø, λ)  Y = g (Ø, λ)  Map projections necessarily distort the Earth and the map scale. Example using Prof. Peter Dana's notes (U. of Colorado) http://www.colorado.edu/geography/gcraft/notes/mapproj/mapproj.htmlExample using ArcMap • ESRI sample data map of 50 US states • Convert to Mass state plane and compare results The following contents of today’s lecture is derived from Longley, Goodchild, Maguire and Rhind, Geographic Information Systems and Science, 2001, as organized by Prof. Zhong-Ren Peng for 11.520 in Fall 2003.Map Projection Classifications based on preservation properties  The conformal property, preserves the shapes of small features on the Earth’s surface (directions). This is useful for navigation. E.g., Mercator projection and Gnomonic projection.  The equal area property, preserves the areas. This is useful for analysis involving areas like the size of the property, e.g., Goode’s projection.  Any projection can have either conformal property or equal area property, but not both. Map Projection classifications based on physical surface models 