UKC

The OS national grid is very prevalent within walking/climbing/etc in the UK. I'm interested in what grid systems are used for outdoor activities in other parts of the world: particularly north America and Europe. In countries with OS-style national mapping agencies, how do maps support describing geographic locations?

Anyone with experience of this care to comment?

In reply to Andy Johnson:

Lookup Universal Transverse Mercator. Divides the Earth into a number of Zones, each with projection parameters to restrict grid distortion local to that Zone, in a similar way to which OSGB does.

Many countries have local projection systems and associated geoid model and datum. Their national mapping agencies will usually publish the model, as the OS does.

Most electronic mapping tools will already have those coordinate projection systems as options, often in 'Units' or similar.

In reply to captain paranoia:

Thanks. I recently got familiar with utm. Its interesting because, while its a global coordinate system, civilian use seems to be mainly confined to North America.

I'm primarily interested in grid systems used with paper maps, rather than apps or digital maps. I understand that USGS topo maps are often used by hikers and climbers in the US and these have UTM tick marks and grid lines. Its less clear what the equivalent is in other parts of the world, which is really what I'm asking about. What does someone out in the hills in eg. Ireland or Norway or Australie etc use to defibe a position?

In reply to Andy Johnson:

These days, paper and electronic mapping are essentially the same thing.

I googled 'norway map projection', and this was one of the first hits:

http://mapref.org/index.html

The title page suggests it might be what you're looking for.

In reply to Andy Johnson:

In Ireland (including Northern Ireland) they'd most likely be using an OSI or OSNI map and it'd be an OS grid reference, similar but different to a British one.

In reply to Andy Johnson:

I've French IGN and German DAV maps at home, I'll check them tonight.

In reply to deepsoup:

The first O.S. maps of Ireland were published in 1833...

Remember that the first reason for mapping was in order to help keep an eye on the rebellious Scots!

In reply to Toerag:

IGN 1:25 000 maps are overlaid with a 1 km grid but I've never heard of any equivalent to grid references in 20 plus years of walking, climbing & skiing with French friends, its never cropped in work either where locations (if not just a name) have always been given in lat/long.

https://geodesie.ign.fr/contenu/fichiers/projections_cartographiques.pdf is an IGN document about the projection they use (in French).

In reply to Doug:

GPS spits out WGS84 lat/long natively. But that's really not a lot of use for a projected map, since the map axes are not linearly scaled in degrees (angle), but in metres (distance). It's instructive to take an STRM DEM 1 degree tile, and project it to OSGB, and see just how much that nice square tile changes shape; almost doubling in height, and with some pincushion effect. I played with a tool called LandSerf around 2011 to do just that. I'll see if I can dig out images.

A distance-based grid reference system makes much more sense...

There's always MGRS. Like OSGB, developed for military (NATO) use, based on UTM, and very similar to OSGB.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Grid_Reference_System

I also created a large Romer scale for the 5km grid squares used on Spanish Alpina UTM maps, discussed here:

http://micronavigation.com/forum/index.php?topic=561.0

Looks like you may need to be a member to see pictures & download. Sadly, MNF went defunct many years ago, so you can no longer join... I have that romer, obviously, and many other map reading tools, too...

In reply to Andy Johnson:

The Norwegian maps for Hurrungane and Rosendal both say UTM 32 WGS 94 for the basic projection.  Then a simple grid overlain for generating grid refs

In reply to Andy Johnson:

In Switzerland it's pretty similar except that to avoid any confusion the origin (0,0) is offset so that it's impossible to mix up north and east, and is also unique unlike in the UK with the OS grid square system

https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/the-swiss-coordinates-system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_coordinate_system

The location of the summit of the mountain behind my house would be given as 2'563'767, 1'107'816 (E,N)

In reply to wbo2: But replying to myself I can't say that I am very content with the idea that Norwegian maps are projected with UTM as the stretch in the N part of Norway would make a rectilinear grid reference difficult

In reply to wbo2:

Thank you. Very useful info.

In reply to deepsoup:

Thank you. Have been reading about OSI and OSNI datums and grids.

In reply to wbo2:

I’ve got a Norge-serien map of Tromso area on my knee and it seems to be UTM (zone 34)

In reply to Andy Johnson:

Quite a lot of places use UTM which, along with it's polar cousin UPS, covers the whole world. A typical local UTM reference consists of 13 digits (6+7) and resolves to a 1m square.  However, there is an almost universal tendency to muddy the waters with MGRS features. That commonly involves using MGRS zones instead of UTM zones. It can also involve using MGRS but not realising what it is and calling it UTM: commonly happens in the USA and also with some British military maps. 

MGRS also covers the whole world. It takes the background pattern of the UTM zones and, prompted by the success of OS Grid references, cuts the zones up into 100km squares designated by two-letter codes. Like OS Grid, the number of digits used determines the resolution and a local six-figure reference resolves to a 100m square. MGRS is correctly called United States National Grid (USNG) on USA civilian maps. 

Irish Grid is in the process of being replaced by Irish Transverse Mercator (ITM)

Swiss Grid originated in the early 20th century and was revised about 30 years ago. 

There are a few other national systems. One reason that countries do this is because the datums used for worldwide systems may not provide good accuracy within their territory. With ridiculously accurate GNSS like Galileo coming into use they need locally accurate systems of co-ordinates. However, there is only so far you can sensibly go with this and we are now at the stage that it all becomes a bit pointless since the precision reaches down to a level that attempts to defy continental drift. 

Another pursuit of pure pointlessness is the idea held by increasing numbers of people and organisations that they are so effin brilliant that they can create a co-ordinate system so much more brilliant than the generations of geographers and surveyors who have gone before. W3W and so on. Just annoying. 

In reply to Jim Fraser:

Is that a Universal Tendency to Muddy (UTM)...?

Might have been avoided if GIS specifications for the emergency services had mandated the ability to accept NGR coordinates...

In reply to captain paranoia:

Fighting that battle regularly.

What is it about NATIONAL grid that public servants do not understand? 

In reply to Jim Fraser:

Ah, but we've got Post Codes; those will help locate an incident to within a few metres. Especially in rural areas...

That's the battle I've had when ringing the emergency services. "What's the postcode?" "No idea, I don't live here; I can give you a 10-figure NGR..." "We can't use those..."

FFS.

In reply to captain paranoia:

Been there, done that. Many times. A surprise to many that I haven't (yet) been arrested for my responses. 

I did write a paper on positioning systems that I circulated within some MR and policing circles.
Page one: 
"1. ORDNANCE SURVEY GB
This is the preferred positioning system for land SAR operations in Scotland."

Prior to the Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Act 2012, a well known fire service did pre-locate thousands of rural addresses with eight-figure grid references. I believe there may have been some 'lively debate' when lowland city dwellers came along and tried to replace those grid references with postcodes.

In reply to Andy Johnson:

Most countries will use their own datums and projection systems, OSGB isn't that special. However, given its 2024 and everything is electronic - there's a big switch to just using lat/long (so WGS84).

In reply to Jim Fraser:

The widespread use of postcodes for location is possibly one of the most infuriating development of modern mapping. Postcodes are not designed for geospatial data, and are subsequently terrible. They were designed for sorting mail in an office, and planning postal routes! 

In reply to Jim Fraser:

Thanks Jim. Very informative.

In reply to ianstevens:

Yes. Postcodes in mountain areas or around large MoD training areas can be 10km across or more simply because of the absence of delivery addresses. And Postcodes are proprietary to Royal Mail Group and a small percentage are constantly changing to suit the changing conditions of delivery addresses. Conversely, grid references are based on basic geometry and never change in the way that postcodes do and have only change on-block as a system about 75 and 100 years ago. 

I did once see Royal Mail Group employees using a system to identify rural address locations that may have used grid reference. Only a glimpse, and that was a while ago, so probably overtaken by current PDA/Tablet technology now.