[GRASS-user] Datum <Sphere_ARC_INFO> not recognised

[Markus Neteler]

On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 6:12 PM, Tyler Smith <tyler.smith at mail.mcgill.ca> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I was creating a new location based on the shapefiles here:
> http://www.epa.gov/wed/pages/ecoregions/na_eco.htm#Downloads
>
> I was a little thrown by this error:
>
> canada_lcc:PERMANENT> g.proj -c
> georef=~/grassdata/downloads/cec-ecoregions/level1/NA_CEC_Eco_Level1.shp
> location=cec_ecoregions
> WARNING: Datum <Sphere_ARC_INFO> not recognised by GRASS and no parameters found
>
> This is just a warning, and the location was created. I still get the
> warning when importing the actual vector map:
>
> cec-ecoregions:PERMANENT> v.in.ogr
> dsn=~/grassdata/downloads/cec-ecoregions/level3/NA_CEC_Eco_Level3.shp
> output=cec_level3
> WARNING: Datum <Sphere_ARC_INFO> not recognised by GRASS and no parameters found
>
> I've now got my data imported, and I've confirmed it was done properly
> by re-projecting it to other locations. So there isn't a problem.
> However, I'm curious what the warning means? Is this something I can
> safely ignore?

I am not sure. It seems to be some ESRI magic:

http://forums.esri.com/Thread.asp?c=93&f=984&t=235780

as well as EPA magic::
http://spatialreference.org/ref/sr-org/80/
http://spatialreference.org/ref/sr-org/80/prettywkt/

In the worst case you could update the loc/mapset/PROJ_INFO file
manually to get the "g.proj -w" output right.

Markus