Some Equal-area, Conformal and Conventional Map Projections: A Tutorial Review

Map projections have been widely used in many areas such as geography, oceanography, meteorology, geology, geodesy, photogrammetry and global positioning systems. Understanding different types of map projections is very crucial in these areas. This paper presents a tutorial review of various types of current map projections such as equal-area, conformal and conventional. We present these map projections from a model of the Earth to a flat sheet of paper or map and derive the plotting equations for them in detail. The first fundamental form and the Gaussian fundamental quantities are defined and applied to obtain the plotting equations and distortions in length, shape and size for some of these map projections.