User Guide 029

19 Appendix I: UTM and State Plane Zones

The main purpose of the State Plane coordinate system was to designe a conformal mapping system which minizes local distortion to less than 1/10,000. In order to achieve this accuracy, some states were divided into smaller zones called FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) zone. The table below lists the US zone names FIPS zone numbers, and UTM zones

mulipage table

A description of the State Plane zones including maps can be viewed at http://www.ems-i.com/smshelp/General_Tools/Coordinates/StatePlane_system.htm.

Figure 19-1. UTM zones for the Lower 48 states (from USGS).