United States National Grid

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Mission

Promote use of the U.S. National Grid (USNG) in Minnesota through collaboration among implementing agencies and interested individuals.  Create consistency within a national context by developing and sharing tools, standards, applications, and educational materials.

Why?

It is universally understood in the response community that a response is only effective as its ability to know "where" to respond.  Regrettably, despite numerous governmental, academic, and professional organizations endorsing use of U.S. National Grid (USNG) to facilitate response communications, adoption of FEMA's coordinate standard for response has been slow and spotty.  Indeed, in recent years, it has become fashionable for GIS practitioners in particular, and some parts of the response community in general, to ignore use of USNG and instead embrace commercial geolocation products such as What3Words, Mapcode, Google Plus Codes, or Natural Area Coding System.  However, the merits of using U.S. National Grid in development of geospatial products which support the Emergency Services Sector are obvious when comparing USNG to proprietary products.

  • In each commercial instance, the user is BUYING into another entity owning their “where” capability, which places the user on a developmental dead-end limited by what the provider will deliver,
  • USNG is the free federally and Minnesota government endorsed standard for Search and Rescue and emergency response which invites follow on innovative development,
  • Proprietary approaches don’t work with GPS, USNG does,
  • Proprietary approaches are NOT part of a bigger eco-system of maps and apps like USNG – proprietary products are their own self-standing “thing",
  • USNG coordinates mean something intuitive – Cartesian distances, based on "10" – which is why this approach has been used by U.S. and NATO armed forces worldwide since the late 1940’s,
  • USNG can be used to provide spatial context/awareness and show relationships to objects,
  • Scalable – USNG works to describe locations ranging from submeter to multi-state, this is not possible with proprietary systems, and
  • USNG works with, or without apps, computers or electricity - a critical factor for emergency response.

Our Story

As one of the first project teams of the EPC, efforts by the U.S. National Grid Project Team have led to development of a number of unique outreach activities and technology advancements.  Some of those efforts have included:

  • Developing techniques for production of "ride along" 8.5x11 mapbooks for responders which display both graphic and aerial views of individual 1KM grid squares on each page,
  • Working with the emergency management community in Northern Minnesota to create Emergency Location Markers for trails and parks based on USNG,
  • Creating the nation's first USNG online resource center which has evolved into the U.S. National Grid Center, and
  • Being central to creation of the emerging national outreach effort - the U.S. National Grid Institute.

Against this backdrop of substantial achievement, members of the USNG Project Team continue to work across Minnesota and the nation to further the cause of getting the entire Emergency Services Sector to think about location in terms of U.S. National Grid.

Project Related Items

Project Team Current Goal

Complete development of a U.S. webmap based system which will allow anyone to upload and make available for download locally prepared USNG maps.

Meetings