Sahibzada Uzair Ullah

What is UPS?
UPS stands for Universal Polar

Stereographic Co-ordinate System. It is made to cover poles of the earth It is basically a planar or azimuthal projection. Bearing is much more accurate than shape or area.

Why UPS is needed?

All the Maps of the earth now a days are generally

made on UTM(Universal Tranverse Mercator). UTM is basically a secant cylindrical projection shown below.

Contnd.
UTM is not discussed comprehensively because it is

out of scope of this presentation. The area we are concerned is

Why UTM cant cover Poles

S.F.(P) 1.0004 1.0 0.9996

1.0 1.0004

Why UTM cant cover Poles

The spaced marked by highligther is not covered in

UTM because the S.F in this region become unacceptable. (0.9996<S.F<1.0004) So What About the POLES?

Here UPS comes for your rescue.

Universal Polar Stereographic Coordinate System

UPS covers the Earth from 84 to 90 North Pole
It covers the Earth 80 to 90 South pole.

To give a better Understanding lets have a look at the following picture.

Method to Draw UPS Projections

As already said it is an azimuthal or planar projection

so it is simply drawn by placing a plane surface on top of globe, as shown in fig.

Contd..
The final shape of this comes out to be

Contd
It covers North and south poles w.r.t bearing and

shape. The latitude in the projection are represented as concentric circles The longitudes are represented by concurrent lines passing through the centre.

Terminologies Of UPS
FALSE Easting & false Northing: It is

hypothetical value of easting & northing assigned to the point of intersection of 0180 and 90 E 90 W (The Polar Origin). The Values are 2,000,000 east and 2,000,000 north.

Characteristics Of UPS
UPS is defined on WGS-84 ellipsoid. The characteristics of WGS-84 are

Major axis=a=6378137 meters Falttening=1/f=298.257223563

Contnd.
UPS projection parameters are given by:
=geodetic latitude X=isometric latitude

=longitude
Z= isometric colatitude=90 isometric latitude K=scale factor for poles

Zones Of UPS
The alphabets left over from UTM such as A ,B ,X, Y, Z

are used for the zones of polar areas. The Letter A is a grid zone designation for the area West to the meridian drawn from 0-180 degree. Letter B is used fro the same extent of area to the east of meridian. In the North polar area Y is grid zone designation for western area.

Contd
Z is used as grid designation for the eastern

area of North Pole from 0-180 degree. The zone divided by UTM are further divided into squares of 100,000 to 10,000 and 1000 meters. To have good idea Just have a look over the picture in the next slide.

Zones Of UPS