Calculation and Visualization of Flexion and Skewness

Abstract

A recent study on map projections expanded two new measures of distortion, namely flexion and skewness. However, it introduced them only for the unit sphere. The present paper derives formulas for the rotational ellipsoid and demonstrates that these kinds of distortion always have a unit of measurement. A new method of illustration is described, by which these quantities can be visualized in an expressive way.