What does albers equal area preserve?

What does albers equal area preserve?

The Albers projection is similar to the Lambert conformal conic projection, however, equal area (or equivalent) projections preserve the area (or the amount of space) within features. On a small-scale political map of the world, the areas within each country are preserved.

Why is Albers equal area conic projection popular for maps of the United States?

The Albers projection is an equal area conic projection. It uses two standard parallels to reduce some of the distortion found in a projection with only one standard parallel. The projection is best suited for land masses extending in an east-to-west orientation at mid-latitudes.

What are the standard parallels for the North America Albers equal area conic?

Uses and applications Used for the conterminous United States, normally using 29°30′ and 45°30′ as the two standard parallels. For this projection, the maximum scale distortion for the 48 states is 1.25 percent.

What type of projection is NAD 1983 contiguous Albers?

equal area map projection
Albers), is a conic, equal area map projection that uses two standard parallels.

Is NAD 1983 a projection?

The North American 1983 datum (NAD83) uses the Geodetic Reference System (GRS80) ellipsoid while the World Geodetic System of 1984 (WGS84) uses the WGS 84 ellipsoid. For example, the “WGS84 projection” is a geographic one. A UTM projection is a projected one. Either of these will use only one datum.

What is a major weakness of the Mercator projection?

Disadvantages: Mercator projection distorts the size of objects as the latitude increases from the Equator to the poles, where the scale becomes infinite. So, for example, Greenland and Antarctica appear much larger relative to land masses near the equator than they actually are.

Where is Alaska located on the US map?

Alaska is the largest state of the United States by area. As you can see on the given Alaska state map, it is non-contiguous state situated extreme north-west of North America continent. Alaska is bordered by Canada in the eastern side; Pacific Ocean lies southern side, and Arctic Ocean lies on the northern side of the state.

Where to put Alaska and Hawaii in basemap?

Now my question is: Is there a simple way to add Alaska and Hawaii to this map and place those at a custom location, e.g. bottom left corner? Something like this:

How to use basemap to plot US with 50 states?

I am aware that the powerful package Basemap can be utilized to plot US map with state boundaries. I have adapted this example from Basemap GitHub repository to plot 48 states colored by their respective population density:

Do you scale down the coordinates of Alaska?

The (x,y) coordinates of each segment (for Alaska and Hawaii) should be translated. I also scale down Alaska to 35% before translating it.