Geodesic grid
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A geodesic grid as a technique primarily used in climate modelling to model the surface of a sphere (Earth). It's formed iteratively from an icosahedron by bisecting the edges of the current polyhedron and projecting the new verticies onto the unit sphere. Each of the verticies in the resulting geodesic corresponds to a cell in the geodesic grid. It can be visualized as several different hexagonal grids strategically stretched over the surface of a sphere, and inherits many of the virtues of 2D hexagonal grids.
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[edit] Positive Traits
- Largely isotropic
- Resolution can be easily increased by binary division
- Does not suffer from over sampling near the poles like more traditional rectangular longitude/latitude square grids
- No single points of contact between neighboring grid cells. Square grids and isometric grids suffer from the ambigous problem of how to handle neighbors that only touch at a single point.
[edit] Negative Traits
- More complicated to implement than rectangular longitude/latitude grids in computers
