State Plane Coordinate System State Plane Coordinate System The State Plane Coordinate System (SPS or SPCS) is a set of 124 geographic zones or coordinate systems designed for specific regions of the United States. Each state contains one or more state plane zones, the boundaries of which usually follow county lines. There are 110 zones in the contiguous US, with 10 more in Alaska, 5 in Hawaii, and one for Puerto Rico and US Virgin Islands. The system is widely used for geographic data by state and local governments. Its popularity is due to at least two factors. First, it uses a simple Cartesian
Distance from a point to a plane We define formula_8, formula_9, formula_10, and formula_11, to obtain formula_1 as the plane expressed in terms of the transformed variables. Now the problem has become one of finding the nearest point on this plane to the origin, and its distance from the origin. The point on the plane in terms of the original coordinates can be found from this point using the above relationships between formula_13 and formula_14, between formula_15 and formula_16, and between formula_17 and formula_18; the distance in terms of the original coordinates is the same as the distance in terms of the revised coordinates. The formula for