What coordinate system should I use if I am mapping all of North America?
Accepted Solutions
It probably depends on your analysis, but generally, web mercator is a bad idea for analysis, given how much distortion it introduces.
As a fun aside, checkout Mercator: EXTREME. It lets you place the north pole somewhere else, and see what a web mercator projection might look like based on that new pole.
You'd probably be okay going with something like an Albers projection. It's what the USGS uses, if that sways your opinion.
It probably depends on your analysis, but generally, web mercator is a bad idea for analysis, given how much distortion it introduces.
As a fun aside, checkout Mercator: EXTREME. It lets you place the north pole somewhere else, and see what a web mercator projection might look like based on that new pole.
You'd probably be okay going with something like an Albers projection. It's what the USGS uses, if that sways your opinion.
I recommend North America Albers Equal Area Conic. If any of your analysis involves area or distance measurements, you'll want an equal area projection.
As @jcarlson said, your map frame is probably using the same coordinate system as your data. But you should probably check to make sure it is. If you are using ArcGIS Pro, you can check it here:
When you Geoprocessing tools, they will use the coordinate system of the input data to compute the analysis.
