Question on lat/long coordinate system (?) - Iceland

I'm looking at a list of places in Iceland with numbers after each one that I presume is a geographic coordinate system that I do not recognize. One example is "6352237-2230607".
Does this format look familiar to anyone?

thanks

This may help
http://gpsman.sourceforge.net/manual/html/GPSMandoc_28.html

That site has the following:

"The Iceland Grid projection is a particular case of the Lambert Conic Conformal projection with 2 standard parallels at N64.75 and N64.25 degrees, a false origin at N65, W19 degrees and the "WGS 84" datum.

The Iceland grid has a false easting and a false northing of 500km."

Since I only use lat/lon, never UTM or anything more exotic, how do I get started with this? I assume that the "false origin" is the origin of the coordinates, but what are false easting and northing? Other than that, I can delve into the math, but a brief overview of Lambert Conic Conformal projection would be appreciated.

Thanks

srhigham said:

Other than that, I can delve into the math, but a brief overview of Lambert Conic Conformal projection would be appreciated.

Click to expand...

I have never had a need to understand too much about this project but Wikipedia has a descent summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambert_conformal_conic_projection

Basically, you can imagine that you place a cone over the surface of the Earth and then project points on the Earth surface to the surface of the cone in such a way that angles are preserved (that's what "conformal" means.) Once you do that, you cut the cone along straight line from the cone vertex and unroll it flat.

This article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easting_and_northing may also be helpful.

it is a version of UTM, specific to Iceland, using the lambert Conic Conformal projection, rather than the mercator projection more commonly used elsewhere for UTM
conversion web page: http://cocodati.lmi.is/cocodati/cocodat-i.jsp
user manual:
http://cocodati.lmi.is/cocodati/cocodati-manual.pdf

By the way, if you once learn o use base 10 UTM, you will never go back to archaic confusing to use base 60 Lat/long

Nessmuk said:

By the way, if you once learn o use base 10 UTM, you will never go back to archaic confusing to use base 60 Lat/long

Click to expand...

I never use UTM coordinates, so I can't tell, but one thing that I like about base 60 Lat/Long format is that it provides natural break points for human brain to process the digits, sort of like we put dashes in phone numbers to make them easier to remember.

iAmKrzys said:

I never use UTM coordinates, so I can't tell, but one thing that I like about base 60 Lat/Long format is that it provides natural break points for human brain to process the digits, sort of like we put dashes in phone numbers to make them easier to remember.

Click to expand...

the base 10 metric system is even better at providing natural break points for the brain to process. You do know that a unit of longitude does not cover a consistent distance over the ground due to convergence of longitude lines as you get farther from the equator toward the poles. A degree of longitude at the equator covers approximately 70 miles, while at any other latitude, you have to calculate the trigonometric cosine of the latitude times 70 to know the distance a degree of longitude spans, and for minutes, divide that by 60, and another 60 for seconds, however, measurement using UTM, remains consistent with meters measured north and south from well known baselines. UTM(and MGRS, or the US National Grid system) is the coordinate system most used by military and other professionals in the field. UTM is laid out in precise 1km squares, so a 1 meter unit of distance is consistently 1 meter everywhere. Airborne assets continue to use lat/long simply because they cover so much distance and cross from one grid zone to the next so quickly

I've come to the realization that I don't need to understand all the mechanics of this - when I truly need to find these locations, I'll just use an online convertor to get lat/long (assuming that the conversion is unambiguous). But thanks for all the input.

Upon further analysis (the coordinate numbers you provided do not make sense with Iceland's UTM system).What you actually have is your desired lat/long coordinates without decimal points
6352237-2230607 = 63.52237N,22.30607W (the minus (-) sign is used as convention indicating west longitude)
which Google Earth shows to be a point in the Atlantic Ocean off the southwest coast of Iceland.
I standby my contention that once in the UTM system, life of the navigator becomes much easier than under lat/long
in this case, the UTM coordinates are: Zone 27N, 435032.5meters east (Easting), 7044455.2meters north (Northing)

Wow, interesting...except the points should be on land! Maybe I mis-typed that example. But that's a good lead and so close that it must be correct.

Nessmuk, here's a related solution that appears to make sense (at least for my example) ... It actually seems to represent 63 deg 52 min 23.7 sec by 22 deg 30 min 60.7 sec. That at least puts it on land.

Strange...don't know if that is a common thing in Iceland or if the list is purposefully obtuse. It might be the latter since this is a list of caves in Iceland and that info is often kept quiet.

Well, that would be your spacing of breaks format in d-m-s. I used to be a very involved caver in NY and NM, so I definitely know about being obtuse in identifying their exact locations.

Nessmuk said:

Upon further analysis (the coordinate numbers you provided do not make sense with Iceland's UTM system).What you actually have is your desired lat/long coordinates without decimal points
6352237-2230607 = 63.52237N,22.30607W (the minus (-) sign is used as convention indicating west longitude)
which Google Earth shows to be a point in the Atlantic Ocean off the southwest coast of Iceland.
I standby my contention that once in the UTM system, life of the navigator becomes much easier than under lat/long
in this case, the UTM coordinates are: Zone 27N, 435032.5meters east (Easting), 7044455.2meters north (Northing)

Click to expand...

I've become a fan of UTM as well since I've been reading more on the subject in mountaineering books, etc. Don't do much hardcore navigating but I do tend to prefer this method. You can print the UTM grid on your CalTopo maps which helps even further.

DayTrip said:

I've become a fan of UTM as well since I've been reading more on the subject in mountaineering books, etc. Don't do much hardcore navigating but I do tend to prefer this method. You can print the UTM grid on your CalTopo maps which helps even further.

Click to expand...

If you have a military background, or if you work with the NYSDEC or SAR, then UTM will be second nature.

srhigham said:

Nessmuk, here's a related solution that appears to make sense (at least for my example) ... It actually seems to represent 63 deg 52 min 23.7 sec by 22 deg 30 min 60.7 sec. That at least puts it on land.

Click to expand...

If you think this might be what you are looking for then you should also check out N 63 deg 52.237 min W 22 deg 30.607 min - this is the default format that many GPS units accept. You can also paste N 63 52.237 W 22 30.607 into Google maps - it points to some small lake/pond shore.

iAmKrrzys - I have a small scale map showing the approximate location of these coordinates, and you are correct...the coordinates are presented in a "ddmm.mmm-ddmm.mmm" format (without decimal points). Very strange, but perhaps not unknown elsewhere in the world.

Thanks all.