168 11 Cartesian to ellipsoidal mapping
Example 11.1 (Example from [172]). Given are the geometric parameters of the
ellipsoid of revolution; semi-major axis a = 6378137.000m and first numerical
eccentricity e
2
= 0.00669437999013 from which the semi-minor axis b is to be
computed. The input data are Cartesian coordinates of 8 points on the surface of
the Earth presented in Table 11.2.
Table 11.2. Cartesian coordinates of topographic points
Point X(m) Y (m) Z(m)
1 3980192.960 0 4967325.285
2 0 0 6356852.314
3 0 0 -6357252.314
4 4423689.486 529842.355 4555616.169
5 4157619.145 664852.698 4775310.888
6 -2125699.324 6012793.226 -91773.648
7 5069470.828 3878707.846 -55331.828
8 213750.930 5641092.098 2977743.624
Using these data, the coefficients of the univariate polynomial (11.26) are com-
puted and used in the Matlab’s roots command, e.g., (4.42) on p. 46 as x
4
=
roots
c
4
c
3
c
2
c
1
c
0
. The obtained roots are then substituted in (11.27) to give
the values of {x
3
, x
2
, x
1
} of the ellipsoidal Cartesian coordinates. The computed
results presented in Table 11.3 are identical to those obtained by [172, Table 4, p.
108]. Once the ellipsoidal Cartesian coordinates have been derived, the ellipsoidal
coordinates (ellipsoidal longitude L, ellipsoidal latitude B and height H) can be
computed using (11.31), (11.32) and (11.33) in Solution 11.6.
Table 11.3. Computed ellipsoidal cartesian coordinates and the Lagrange factor
Point x
1
(m) x
2
(m) x
3
(m) x
4
(m
−2
)
1 3980099.549 0.000 4967207.921 5.808116e-019
2 0.000 0.000 6356752.314 3.867016e-019
3 0.000 0.000 -6356752.314 1.933512e-018
4 4420299.446 529436.317 4552101.519 1.897940e-017
5 4157391.441 664816.285 4775047.592 1.355437e-018
6 -2125695.991 6012783.798 -91773.503 3.880221e-020
7 5065341.132 3875548.170 -55286.450 2.017617e-017
8 213453.298 5633237.315 2973569.442 3.450687e-017
Example 11.2 (Case study: Baltic sea level project). Let us adopt the world geode-
tic datum 2000 with the semi-major axis a=6378136.602 m and semi-minor axis
b=6356751.860 m from [167]. Here we take advantage of given Cartesian coor-
dinates of 21 points of the topographic surface of the Earth presented in Table
11.4. Using these data, the coefficients of (11.26) are computed and used to solve
for x
4
. With the admissible values of x
4
substituted in (11.27), the values of the
ellipsoidal Cartesian coordinates (x
1
, x
2
, x
3
) = (x, y, z) are produced and are as
presented in Table 11.5. They are finally converted by means of Solution 11.6 to