Polar Projections

As well as equal area projections, the Equal-Area-Maps.com website hosts a number of sample polar maps. These samples are also used in a series of articles which will be published on the Geo Web Guru website.

All of the following polar maps use azimuthal projections. The different projections have different properties, and only one has the equal area property.

Polar projections with fully implemented maps

KML or GeoRSS feeds can be plotted as overlays on the following maps:

Azimuthal Equidistant - preserves distances

Lambert Azimuthal Equal Area - preserves areas

Gnomonic - all great circles become straight lines

Stereographic - conformal, equal angle

Universal Polar Stereographic (UPS) - a specific Stereographic Projection for use with UTM (Universal Transverse Mercator) system

Orthographic - infinite perspective projection

Projections with interactive basemaps but no overlay capability

Due to limited projection support in the Proj4JS library (and hence OpenLayers), the following polar map can be viewed, zoomed, panned, etc but the overlay capability has been disabled:

Near-Sided Perspective - finite perspective projection