The National Geodetic Survey has announced plans to update the National Spatial Reference System with a new geometric datum comprised of four reference frames: the North American Terrestrial Reference Frame of 2022; the Pacific Terrestrial Reference Frame of 2022; the Caribbean Terrestrial Reference Frame of 2022; and the Mariana Terrestrial Reference Frame of 2022. Just as the change from the North American Datum of 1927 to the North American Datum of 1983 required new state plane coordinate zones, the change to the TRF2022 reference frames will require new state plane coordinate zones. This has presented geospatial professional in the United States with an opportunity to modernize the state plane coordinate system using tools and data that was nonexistent when SPCS83 was designed.

Projections allow geospatial professionals to utilize a “useful fiction” that the round Earth is flat. Such fictions permit the use of cartesian coordinates in computer-aided drafting and design (CADD) software and in field data collectors, as well as the use of plane trigonometry and plane geometry to evaluate measurement data gathered in cadastral surveys. Projecting coordinates from a round Earth onto a flat plane has overhead, particularly in the form of distortion: distortion in distances, angles, directions and areas. With careful design of the projection these distortions can be managed.

With the computing power and massive quantities of Earth data available to geodesists today, notably compared to the mid 1980’s when the SPCS83 was designed, these distortions can be mitigated and reduced so as to be considered negligible for most surveying applications.

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