Universal Transverse Mercator coordinate system

The Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) is a map projection system for assigning coordinates to locations on the surface of the Earth. Like the traditional method of latitude and longitude, it is a horizontal position representation, which means it ignores altitude and treats the earth surface as a perfect ellipsoid. However, it differs from global latitude/longitude in that it divides earth into 60 zones and projects each to the plane as a basis for its coordinates. Specifying a location means specifying the zone and the x, y coordinate in that plane. The projection from spheroid to a UTM zone is some parameterization of the transverse Mercator projection. The parameters vary by nation or region or mapping system.

Geodesy
Fundamentals
Concepts
Technologies
Standards (history)
NGVD 29 Sea Level Datum 1929
OSGB36 Ordnance Survey Great Britain 1936
SK-42 Systema Koordinat 1942 goda
ED50 European Datum 1950
SAD69 South American Datum 1969
GRS 80 Geodetic Reference System 1980
ISO 6709 Geographic point coord. 1983
NAD 83 North American Datum 1983
WGS 84 World Geodetic System 1984
NAVD 88 N. American Vertical Datum 1988
ETRS89 European Terrestrial Ref. Sys. 1989
GCJ-02 Chinese obfuscated datum 2002
Geo URI Internet link to a point 2010

Most zones in UTM span 6 degrees of longitude, and each has a designated central meridian. The scale factor at the central meridian is specified to be 0.9996 of true scale for most UTM systems in use.

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