Talk:Geographic centers of the United States

Washington's geographic center
There is no way Washington's geographic center could be located 10 miles WSW of Wenatchee. That is way up north, and if you were to compare west to east distances starting with Washington's westernmost point of longitude to 10 miles WSW of Wenatchee, then that same distance east, you'd still be going miles east of Washington's easternmost point of longitude. If you go to Mapquest, type in Washington in state, and this will automatically center to the geographic center of the state (about 10-15 miles NNW of Ellensburg). 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Hawaii
I don't know how these locations were determined, but it seems very logical to me that the geographic center of Hawaii should be somewhere on land in Hawaii County, since it alone comprises more than five-eighths (5/8) of the entire state's land. Backspace (talk) 02:46, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

Table directions
The text of the table should use the same directional terms. For example, ENE or southsouthwest, instead of a mix of each. &mdash; MrDolomite &bull; Talk 05:31, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

Coordinate error
The coördinates listed for the geographic center of Florida are about 60 miles southeast of the location given by the USGS as "12 miles north-northwest of Brooksville".

Inspection of a map reveals that the coördinates are clearly too far east and south to represent the geographic center of Florida. (Point "A" indicates Brooksville; point "B" indicates the coördinates.)

Michael S. Saunders (talk) 22:21, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Done. BrainMarble (talk) 22:37, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Entire U.S.
The article claims that "the geographical center of the entire U.S. is northeast of Belle Fourche in Butte County, South Dakota 44.96667°N, -103.76667°W". Apparently someone decided Alaska is part of "entire" but Hawaii isn't or something. I thought about changing the wording to "continental" but that would just be speculative assumption: without a reference even given yet, I'm don't want to guess at what area was really included or excluded, or, more to the point, whether a claim dubiously marked as "entire" is even calculated correctly. --Closeapple (talk) 04:42, 25 September 2010 (UTC)


 * The problem was that the article did not provide a reference for the designation of the geographical of the U.S., as determined after the admission of Alaska and Hawaii to the union in 1959. The reference from NOAA's website explains the method by which the adjustment was made. The geographic center of the 48 contiguous states was designated as "approximately at latitude 39°50'N, longitude 98°35'W, near Lebanon, Kansas." The admission of Alaska moved this center to "approximately latitude 44°59'N, longitude 103°38'W, about eleven miles west of Castle Rock, Butte County, South Dakota." After Hawaii was admitted, the geographic center "shifted about six miles west-southwest to latitude 44°58'N, longitude 103°46'W, which is approximately 17 miles west of Castle Rock, Butte County, South Dakota." The reference explains that "the effect of including Hawaii is rather small since its area is only about 1/560 of that of the forty-nine states." NameIsRon (talk) 16:40, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

Method?
How exactly is a "geographic center" calculated? Is it simply the "central" coordinates of a bounding box (bounding quadrangle) containing the region in question? Or is it more like a center of mass, and if so, is that calculated in 3D cartesian coordinates or 2D lat/lon? Personally, I think the "best" method would be the 3D center of mass, but this article just doesn't say which method was used and I think that's a significant oversight. 99.177.172.109 (talk) 06:03, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

Coordinates?
I noticed that most of the content of this page was sourced from http://www.netstate.com/states/geography/. There it also lists the coordinates of the centers of the states, something which is mostly missing here. I ran a script through to convert the pages, but I'd like some input before I commit the table to the article. Most specifically, I would like to make sure that I'm not overwriting anything that was sourced from somewhere separate, and that there are no other errors. Josejuan05 (talk) 01:14, 13 August 2011 (UTC)


 * The coordinates are wrong for at least Missouri and Montana. Missouri center is in Louisiana and Montana center is in Wyoming. --Bamyers99 (talk) 02:31, 24 November 2011 (UTC)


 * The script is correct in retrieving the data from the website, but the definition of some of the centers is incorrect. For instance, if you look at Missouri on the page http://www.netstate.com/states/geography/mo_geography.htm, it lists the outer boundaries for the Longitude: 89° 6'W to 95° 42'W, for the Latitude: 36°N to 40° 35'N.  However, it lists the center at 92° 37.9'W 32° 48.9'N.  We already know that to be incorrect because the latitude is outside of the (listed) outer boundaries for the state.  If you do some rough algebraic calculations(I mean ROUGH--assume the states are rectangular, ie the long/lat are locations of the corner points and assume the long/lat boundaries are correct), the "average" of the longitudes is 92.4°W (which is fairly close to where they list the center) and the "average" of the latitudes is 38.2917°N (which puts the center into MO and out of LA).  Even though the source that this site references as having listed the geographic centers (and the source since retracted and explained the errors and reasoning for retraction), it seems reasonable that there was a calculation error somewhere and the original data or method for calculating the center or other such things could have been lost/corrupted, etc. which may have made fixing said calculation error difficult if not impossible. (I also realize that the average may not represent a true location of the "geographic center" and the center of mass may be more accurate though not necessarily representative of the true location of the geographic center.)  In conclusion, your script seems to work great but the locations are what are not correct. :) biancasimone (talk) 21:55, 2 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Hi, the coordinates from the article (the "updated list") are obviously wrong for South Dakota too (latitude is said to be "33.9169°N", which is way outside its bounds on South Dakota article ("42° 29′ N to 45° 56′ N") (it is rather in Texas...), whereas for this particular State, the coordinates from Josejuan05's table look more accurate ("44°24′6″N"). But as pointed out by Biancasimone, other coordinates seem wrong in the latter table, so none of the two seem 100% accurate.
 * In the case of Missouri, Netstate website provides a URL to MapQuest service, with even different coordinates than what is specified on the page (latitude on page: "32° 48.9'N" / in URL: "38° 29′ 7″"), so it may be a copy-paste mistake (with latitude of Mississippi for instance, which is also "32° 48.9'N").
 * We should also notice that all URL to cartography services on Netstate have converted the decimal minutes (mm.d) to minutes and seconds (mm ss) without multiplying d by 60, so in the case of Mississippi for example, "48.9′" has been converted to "latmin = 48 & latsec = 9". Most of other States also have coordinates with decimal minutes (in the form mm.d) with d never exceeding 9, so it really looks like the decimal fraction of the minutes, rather than the concatenation of minutes and seconds (which could have gone up to 59). The mistake is not obvious as it is less than 1 minute, i.e. less than 2km at that latitude. Definitely, we lack an accurate reference source... Maybe we should at least warn for the inaccuracy of the data in the article? --Ghybs (talk) 12:23, 21 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Edit 23-Sep-2015: Geopar1 kindly corrected coordinates of South Dakota and South Carolina in the "updated list", so it looks more accurate now. As I do not have access to the reference article, I cannot double check unfortunately, but at least visually the data makes sense when displayed on a map. -- Ghybs (talk) 11:05, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

New Jersey
The reference to a point near Trenton may be good, but the Latitude / Longitude shown to the right are for a different point much too far east. 69.125.206.185 (talk) 07:20, 25 September 2013 (UTC)Ken Allison