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## Universal Transverse Mercator UTM (-–Ju -–JU)

A particular subset of the transverse Mercator is the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) which was adopted by the US Army for large-scale military maps. Here, the globe is divided into 60 zones between 84oS and 84oN, most of which are 6o wide. Each of these UTM zones have their unique central meridian. GMT implements both the transverse Mercator and the UTM projection. When selecting UTM you must specify:

  UTM zone (1-60). Use negative value for zones in the southern hemisphere

  Scale along the equator in inch/degree or 1:xxxxx (-Ju), or map width (-JU)

In order to minimize the distortion in any given zone, a scale factor of 0.9996 has been factored into the formulae. The scale only varies by 1 part in 1,000 from true scale at equator. The ellipsoidal projection expressions are accurate for map areas that extend less than 10o away from the central meridian. For larger regions we use the conformal latitude in the general spherical formulae instead.

Next: Oblique Mercator (–-Jo -–JO) Up: Cylindrical Projections Previous: Transverse Mercator (-–Jt -–JT)