CoordMapKnowledge hub
Geographic Guides
Evergreen explainers for latitude, longitude, GPS formats and geocoding. Each guide links back to the CoordMap tool that does the work.
Coordinates
Latitude is the angular distance north or south of the equator. It ranges from 90° S at the South Pole to 90° N at the North Pole, with 0° on the equator. On CoordMap and in GPS, latitude is listed first in a WGS84 pair.
What Is Longitude?Longitude is the angular distance east or west of the prime meridian in Greenwich. It ranges from −180° to +180° (or 180° W to 180° E). Unlike latitude, the ground distance of one degree of longitude shrinks toward the poles.
Latitude vs LongitudeLatitude is north–south (−90 to 90). Longitude is east–west (−180 to 180). CoordMap writes latitude first. If a “latitude” is 120, the pair is almost certainly swapped or in the wrong CRS.
How to Read GPS CoordinatesGPS coordinates on CoordMap are WGS84. Decimal degrees (DD) look like 51.5074. DMS splits each value into degrees, minutes and seconds with N/S or E/W. DDM uses degrees plus decimal minutes. All three can describe the same point.