Let . The condition gives . On the outer coordinate surface , elimination of gives . On , the surface is the plane , with . Thus the closure of the body is
It is a solid circular cap bounded below by an elliptic paraboloid of revolution and above by the unit disk in . Its vertex is , its height is , and its rim is the circle . The symmetry axis is the axis. The coordinate surface maps to that axis rather than to an additional two-dimensional boundary. These are parabolic coordinates.
Figure 1.
The solid cap bounded by an elliptic paraboloid and the disk , with a filled meridian cross-section
. Details.
Differentiate the position vector with respect to the three coordinates to obtain the coordinate basis vectors:
The chain rule gives . The scale factors of orthogonal coordinates are the corresponding norms:
Direct dot products give , , and . Thus the parabolic coordinates are orthogonal wherever the coordinate vectors are nondegenerate. Their degeneracy on is the usual axis degeneracy of the azimuthal coordinate.