One of the simplest projections, the y value equals the latitude, and the x value equals the sine of the longitude. It is used by the U.S. Geological Survey in interrupted form for a map of world hydrocarbon reserves.

 In 1570, Jean Cossin of Dieppe was one of the first to show the Sinusoidal Projection§  As the equatorial limiting form of the more general Bonne Projection, the Sinusoidal is an equal-area, pseudocylindrical projection in which the parallels are equally spaced straight lines, the meridians are equally spaced sinusoidal curves, and the poles are points.  Since its introduction and continuing to the present, this projection has been favored for atlases, due in part to the simplicity of its construction, both graphically and mathematically. It is often used in various interruptions, transformations, and combinations with other projections.

Projected by Ptolemyä from the Central Intelligence Agency Micro World Database.

§Source:  John P. Snyder, Map Projections--A Working Manual; U.S.G.S Professional Paper 1395, U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, D.C. 1987, pp. 243-248.

Sinusoidal

Greenwich Sinusoid Copyright © 1993 W. Murray Sexton.  All rights reserved.

How'd you do that?
BuiltWithNOF
Up to Parent Page
Return Home
Next Page
Down to First Child Page
First Child PageUpNext PageHomePrevious Page

Scroll down for description.

Click East for next map.

Click North to return to list.

If you don’t have Whip! you can still see the JPGs, but to fully appreciate these engineering-quality maps, download and install the free Whip! viewer plug-in (3.5MB).  You will then be able to see the scalable vector versions of select maps.
Click on the Vector Map link on each page to view the DWF file.  You can pan around and zoom in on them, because they are true scaleable vector drawings.  Using the Right Click menu, you can even turn layers on and off individually.
The extreme precision and detail of these maps cannot be reproduced in raster formats.  The world maps are designed to be plotted at sizes up to 24” by 36” by robotic pen plotter. Some of the oil and gas maps were designed to be viewed up close when plotted at 300 dpi, at sizes up to 3 feet by 10 feet. The size of a BMP file of that scale would be approximately 1.5 gigabytes.
If you have limited bandwidth, be aware that the DWF files contained in this site range from about 100KB to about 750KB.