A bevy of area-preserving transforms for map projection designers

ABSTRACT

Sometimes map projection designers need to create equal-area projections to best fill the projections’ purposes. However, unlike for conformal projections, few transformations have been described that can be applied to equal-area projections to develop new equal-area projections. Here, I survey area-preserving transformations, giving examples of their applications and proposing an efficient way of deploying an equal-area system for raster-based Web mapping. Together, these transformations provide a toolbox for the map projection designer working in the area-preserving domain.

KEYWORDS:

• Map projection
• equal-area projection
• area-preserving transformation
• area-preserving homotopy
• Strebe 1995 projection

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the attention given to this paper by the several anonymous reviewers, as well as by my less anonymous wife, Tiffany Lillie. It is a better paper for their efforts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.