What is the difference between GRS80 and WGS84?
Please note that the GRS80 and WGS84 are considered to be the same. Actually, there is a very small difference in the flattening which results in the semi-minor axis, b, being different by 0.0001 meters. There is no known application for which this difference is significant.
What map datum should I use?
The WGS 84 datum, within two meters of the NAD83 datum used in North America, is the only world referencing system in place today. WGS 84 is the default standard datum for coordinates stored in recreational and commercial GPS units.
What does WGS84 Preserve?
WGS 1984 Web Mercator and WGS 1984 Web Mercator (Auxiliary Sphere) use a conformal projection that preserves direction and the shape of data but distorts distance and area. Note that distances are very distorted in the east-west direction, north or south of the Equator.
Where is the WGS84 datum?
The coordinate origin of WGS 84 is meant to be located at the Earth’s center of mass; the uncertainty is believed to be less than 2 cm. The WGS 84 meridian of zero longitude is the IERS Reference Meridian, 5.3 arc seconds or 102 metres (335 ft) east of the Greenwich meridian at the latitude of the Royal Observatory.
What datum does Google Earth use?
Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth use a Mercator projection based on the World Geodetic System (WGS) 1984 geographic coordinate system (datum). This Mercator projection supports spheres only, unlike the ESRI Mercator implementation, which supports spheres and ellipsoids.
What map datum does the military use?
The Military Grid Reference System (MGRS) is the geocoordinate standard used by NATO militaries for locating points on Earth. The MGRS is derived from the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) grid system and the Universal Polar Stereographic (UPS) grid system, but uses a different labeling convention.
Where is WGS84 datum?
Where is WGS 84 used?
GPS
The most known use case is GPS, which uses WGS84 as its coordinate system. Your drone also contains a GPS which is used to tag the pictures acquired with your drone with coordinates and elevations that are determined in the WGS84 coordinate system.
When did WGS 84 become the standard datum?
In January 1987, it became the default standard datum for coordinates stored in recreational and commercial GPS units. Since its inception, WGS 84 has been updated twice, most recently in 2008, to increase its operability with GPS systems. WGS 84 is valid through 2010 and is due for an update in the near future.
How big is the surface of the WGS 84?
As of the latest revision, the WGS 84 datum surface is a pole-flattened (oblate) spheroid, with major (transverse) radius a = 6,378,137 m at the equator, and minor (conjugate) radius b = 6,356,752.314 245 m at the poles (a flattening of 21.384 685 755 km, or 1/298.257 223 563 ≈ 0.335% in relative terms).
Where is the WGS 84 meridian of zero longitude located?
Defining Parameters. The coordinate origin of WGS 84 is meant to be located at the Earth’s center of mass; the uncertainty is believed to be less than 2 cm. The WGS 84 meridian of zero longitude is the IERS Reference Meridian, 5.3 arc seconds or 102 metres (335 ft) east of the Greenwich meridian at the latitude of the Royal Observatory.
What is the World Geodetic System of 1984?
The World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS84) is an ellipsoid, datum and coordinate system ( Archive) which is widely used in cartography, geodesy and navigation fields, including use with Google Maps. WGS84 represents the world with a spherical coordinate system.