Cartographic Projection
every map is wrong, and by exactly how much
Figure

The same six projections, ranked over Europe and Chile

Drawn here at the parameters it defaults to, with every essay that calls it.
The same six projections, ranked over Europe and Chile. Each column orders the projections by Kavrayskiy's regional criterion — the root-mean-square departure of the two principal scales from unity, integrated over the region with the area element. The lines cross, which is the point: Lambert conformal conic leads over Europe and comes fifth over Chile. A table of projections ordered by distortion is a table about somebody's region.

Each column orders the projections by Kavrayskiy's regional criterion — the root-mean-square departure of the two principal scales from unity, integrated over the region with the area element. The lines cross, which is the point: Lambert conformal conic leads over Europe and comes fifth over Chile. A table of projections ordered by distortion is a table about somebody's region.

It is one of 7 figures drawn by the same construction, and the drawing above is this one with nothing changed.

25 essays call it. Every call below passes it something, because a placement that passes nothing draws whichever member of the family the generator happens to default to rather than the one its essay argues about.

Where it is called

Changing this changes every one of these figures.

The least distortion possible over a 30° region. Scale factor along a radius of the cap, each projection normalised to unit scale at the centre. Chebyshev's criterion names the projection whose scale is constant on the boundary as the conformal map of least scale variation, and for a cap that is the stereographic projection centred on it — reaching exactly sec²(ρ/2) = 1.0718 at the rim, marked. Every other conformal projection drawn here rises past that line before it gets there. It shows an optimum rather than a comparison. The impossibility

Total curvature and the scale rule

The impossibility has a size. A region covering a fraction of the sphere carries a fixed amount of curvature that any flat map must absorb, and for a circular region the least distortion any conformal projection can achieve is a closed form nobody can beat.

 The least distortion possible over a 30° region. Scale factor along a radius of the cap, each projection normalised to unit scale at the centre. Chebyshev's criterion names the projection whose scale is constant on the boundary as the conformal map of least scale variation, and for a cap that is the stereographic projection centred on it — reaching exactly sec²(ρ/2) = 1.0718 at the rim, marked. Every other conformal projection drawn here rises past that line before it gets there. It shows an optimum rather than a comparison. What each projection optimises

Chebyshev's criterion

The only optimality theorem in the subject. Among all conformal projections of a region, the one with least scale variation is the one whose scale factor is constant on the boundary — a criterion with a proof, a unique answer, and a test anyone can run.

 The same six projections, ranked over Europe and Chile. Each column orders the projections by Kavrayskiy's regional criterion — the root-mean-square departure of the two principal scales from unity, integrated over the region with the area element. The lines cross, which is the point: Lambert conformal conic leads over Europe and comes fifth over Chile. A table of projections ordered by distortion is a table about somebody's region. Measuring distortion

Distortion over a region

An indicatrix describes a point and every practical question is about a country. Going from one to the other means integrating, integrating means choosing a weighting, and the weighting is the step that turns a measurement into somebody's opinion.

 The scale factor across Europe, from the middle outwards. Each band is the range the larger principal scale factor takes on the ring at that distance from the centre of Europe: 0 is the middle, 1 the frontier. two of the three projections drawn are conformal, and every one of those reaches its maximum at the right-hand edge, because the logarithm of a conformal map's scale factor is subharmonic. None of them reaches a maximum inside the region. Measuring distortion

Where the worst point is

The largest scale error on a conformal map of a country is always on the frontier, never inside it, whatever the country's shape and whichever conformal projection was chosen. It is a theorem rather than a tendency, and it is the reason Chebyshev's criterion works.

 The scale along the Madrid–Tokyo corridor. The scale factor of four projections along the great circle from Madrid to Tokyo, each normalised to its own average over the route so the comparison is of variation rather than of size. The oblique Mercator whose own equator is laid along the corridor holds the scale to 0 parts per million; Mercator varies by 118.7% over the same line. A corridor is a curve, not a region, and the projection an area criterion picks is not the one a curve wants. What each projection optimises

Choosing for a line, not a region

Every criterion in this subject integrates over an area. A pipeline, a railway or a coastal survey is a curve, and the projection an area criterion picks for it is not the one it should have — measurably, by a factor of five thousand.

 The taught rule against the measurement, on 30 regions. Each cell is a region built to order — a box of the stated height and width-to-height ratio, centred at the stated latitude — with the family that actually scores best over it, and whether that is what the rule says. Every family is given its own parameters for the region: the conic its cone constant, the cylindrical its standard parallel and the choice of a normal or transverse axis, the azimuthal its centre. The rule is right on 19 of 30, and where it is wrong it is wrong in one direction: it keys on latitude, and what decides the answer is shape. What is taught wrongly

The rule of thumb, scored

Cylindrical near the equator, conic in the middle latitudes, azimuthal at the poles. It is the most repeated piece of practical advice in cartography and it has never been run against a population of regions. Run against thirty, it is right nineteen times, and every one of its failures has the same shape.

 The minimum-distortion conformal map of an elongated region, 30° by 10°. The conformal projection of an elongated region, 30° by 10° whose scale is constant on the boundary, which is Chebyshev's criterion, obtained by fitting eight terms of a series rather than by choosing a named projection. The scale factor runs from 0.98640 to 1.00000, a spread of 1.01379; on the boundary itself the largest departure from constancy is 2.13e-7 in the log, which is what the fit achieved and not what it was told. Each dot is an interior sample shaded by its own departure from the boundary's scale. What each projection optimises

Solving for the map instead of choosing it

Chebyshev's criterion has sat on this site since its second phase with one case it could be applied to: the spherical cap, whose answer is the stereographic projection. For any other region the site stated the criterion and stopped. It is a linear least-squares fit, and the fitted map beats every named projection over the region it was fitted to.

 Which projection wins, by the first derivative and by the second. Each column is a region, with the projections listed in the order Kavrayskiy's first-order criterion puts them in and the figure at the right of each row giving that projection's rank under the second-order criterion — flexion and skewness aggregated the same way. The rank correlations are Europe 0.83, the conterminous United States 0.81, the tropics 0.90, a cap of 30° radius 0.88, so the two orders agree broadly and disagree in detail. Where it matters is the winner: over a cap of 30° radius the choice moves from Albers equal-area conic to Lambert azimuthal equal-area, while Europe and the conterminous United States and the tropics keep theirs. A criterion that changed every answer would be suspect and one that changed none would be decoration. Measuring distortion

The second derivative over a region

Flexion has been measured at points and over the whole sphere, and never over a region — which is the only unit anybody chooses a projection for. Doing it finds that the second-order criterion moves the winner in one region of four, and that one projection in the library has no second derivative at all.

 5 of 400 nearest-neighbour queries change answer in the plane. 40 sites and 400 queries over -20° to 40° east and 35° to 70° north, each query answered twice — once by geodesic distance and once by straight-line distance in the stored plane. They agree 98.8 per cent of the time, which is why the operation survives, and the 5 that differ are marked. The mechanism is not that the plane is wrong by a lot but that its scale factor varies: over this region it spans 139 per cent, and every disagreement is a contest closer than that — the worst margin measured is 6.4 per cent. The furthest a wrong answer is from the right one is 24 kilometres. What a machine does with it

Nearest is a question about the metric

Asked in the plane the data is stored in, a nearest-neighbour query returns a different site for 5 of 400 queries over Europe on Web Mercator — and 103 of 400 on the plate carrée, with the wrong answer up to 309 kilometres further away. Every disagreement is a contest closer than the region's own scale spread, and over a city there are none.

 Two rules, three populations. The taught rule keys on latitude; the replacement keys on shape. On the thirty regions the replacement was read from it scores 83 per cent against the taught rule's 63. On forty-five different regions built the same way it scores 91 — higher, not lower, so the generalisation the shortfall doubted is real. On the seven named regions this collection actually uses, both rules score 29 per cent, and following either costs a mean factor of 14.6. The third bar of each group puts the taught rule's polar clause back into the shape rule, which is what the out-of-sample failures ask for: it repairs four of them, breaks two that were right, and reaches 43 of 45. What is taught wrongly

The rule scored out of sample

A replacement rule was read off thirty regions and scored on the same thirty, and this collection recorded that as not being evidence about any other thirty. It is: on forty-five different regions the rule scores 91 per cent against the 83 it managed at home. What it cannot do is the seven regions the collection actually uses, where both it and the rule it replaced name the winner twice out of seven and cost a mean factor of 14.6.

 Every aspect of Mercator over Japan, and the line the old sweep searched. The regional distortion of Mercator over Japan for every position of the projection's pole — darker is better — with the meridian the site's one-dimensional sweep searches drawn on it. The sweep's best is a gain of 24.4× over the normal aspect; the two-parameter search finds 61.4×, which is 2.51 times better again, at a pole 45° of longitude away from anything the sweep could reach. The shortfall recorded when the sweep was written said this would happen for a region whose long axis runs diagonally, and this is the measurement of it. What each projection optimises

The aspect has three numbers, not one

The site's aspect search has swung the projection's axis through one plane for a long time, and recorded that a region whose long axis runs diagonally has its optimum somewhere that plane never reaches. Searching the whole sphere of pole positions finds 2.6 times more improvement over Japan and 3.4 over the conterminous United States.

 Every library projection over Europe, on the two axes it can be wrong on. Each dot is one projection, scored over Europe on the two independent failures: how much it turns angles and how much it changes areas. The lower-left corner is the isometry that does not exist. The line joins the five projections nothing beats on both counts — the rest are inside it, and a reader who prefers either failure to the other should still not choose one of them, whatever weighting they hold. What is taught wrongly

The projections that are beaten on both counts

A rule of thumb has been scored over thirty regions and then forty-five. The same populations answer a harder question nobody has put: which library members are never the right answer at all. Two are beaten outright on both criteria everywhere, one is on no regional front in any population — and it is on the world's.

 The parameters are not reproducible and the map is. The three-parameter aspect search run at three grid resolutions and compared with the finest, twice over. Compared on the numbers it returns, the answers are 65° of pole apart. Compared on what they do to the region — the root-mean-square difference in angular deformation at every sample — they are 0.29° apart, against a map whose own deformation over that region averages about a degree. The disagreement recorded as a shortfall is a disagreement about coordinates for one map. What each projection optimises

Report the map, not the parameters

The aspect search was found returning the same score to 2.3 per cent from poles sixty degrees of latitude apart, which left the answer looking irreproducible. That reading assumed the disagreeing triples make disagreeing maps. They do not — the three answers agree on the distortion field to a quarter of the deformation the map already has.

 The set of aspects within a stated distance of the best, for Robinson over Japan. Each row takes every point of a 36 × 19 × 24 grid in the three aspect parameters that scores within (1 + t) of the best, joins neighbouring points, and identifies the pieces the exact degeneracy relates. At t = 3 it is one connected piece spanning 170° of pole; by t = 1 it has broken into 2 pieces; and by t = 0.3 the largest of them spans 11°. So it is not one valley and it is not one basin — it is a sheet that fractures. What each projection optimises

The shape of the valley

An aspect search returns three numbers, two searches return triples that differ by a hemisphere, and the maps they produce agree. One cause is an exact degeneracy and the rest was called a valley and left unmeasured. Sampled densely, it is neither a valley nor a basin: a connected sheet spanning 170° of pole that splits in two at twice the best score and into thirteen pieces by 1.7 times it.

 Where Robinson's valley breaks, against how large the region is. The threshold at which the set of near-optimal aspects stops being one connected piece, for square regions of growing size at 38° north. It falls from 2.10 at 6° to 0.27 at 30°, a factor of 7.9. The earlier measurement was made at one region and quoted "about twice the optimum"; that value belongs to a small region, and the prediction that it should fall as the region grows is what this tests. What each projection optimises

Where the valley breaks in two

A near-optimal set is one connected sheet at a loose threshold and thirteen basins at a tight one, and the transition was explained without being tested. The explanation is a prediction about region size and projection sharpness: swept over both, the threshold falls from 2.10 to 0.27 as a region grows from 6° to 30°, three projections lie on nearly one curve, and a fourth declines to join for a reason worth having.

 The pass between the basins, measured rather than bracketed. The height of the lowest path from one near-optimal basin to the other, for regions of growing size. It is found by sorting the score surface and joining cells in order, so it is the minimax path's own height rather than the level at which a bisection stops finding two pieces. The fitted exponent is -1.34 at a coefficient of determination of 0.986. The earlier level-set measurement on the same projection gave -1.57 and the argument predicts −1, so measuring the height directly moves the answer towards the prediction, though not onto it. What each projection optimises

The height of the pass between two basins

One thing was left owed: the fracture threshold falls faster than the argument predicts, and the difference was supposed to be the level set's blindness to the height of the pass. Measured directly, the pass between the two deepest basins falls as the −1.34 power at R-squared 0.986 — nearer the predicted −1 than the level set's −1.57 on the same projection, and not onto it. It is not the pass that breaks the set first, and at five of six sizes the second basin is the first one's mirror twin.

The whole library