Trouble with Projections and Transformations

[KensieWorsham1]

I have some shapefiles that are in Projected Coordinate System, UTM, NAD 1983, Zone 15N.  I am having difficulty re-projecting other shapefiles from WGS_1984 for example, into the other coordinate system. 

The tools say that they run and when you check the coordinate systems they read the same, but when they are added to ArcMap they do not draw the same. You can zoom to layer on one and it shows but the other that was re-projected will not show. 

Thank you for any help that you can give me.

Thanks,



JKW

[MelitaKennedy]

Hi Tufayel,

The data was already in NAD83 UTM 13N, so all that needed to happen was adding this information to the shapefile. That's done with the Define Projection tool or the data's property page in ArcCatalog. Check out the data's extents above the coordinate system in the picture you posted. Do those look like latitude and longitude (decimal degree) values? They're much too big. When you defined the data as NAD 1983 (geographic coordinate system), the software tried to interpret the very large coordinates as if they're decimal degrees.

Melita

[TufayelChowdhury]

Thanks Melita. I agree that the data was already in NAD83 UTM Zone 13. What I don't quite get is when I used Define Projection tool, what went wrong.

Tufayel