A geodesic grid is a technique used to model the surface of a sphere (the Earth) with a subdivided polyhedron, usually an icosahedron.
Introduction
When modeling the weather, ocean circulation, or the climate, partial differential equations are used to describe the evolution of these systems over time. Because computer programs are used to build and work with these complex models, approximations need to be formulated into easily computable forms. Some of these numerical analysis techniques (such as finite differences) require the area of interest to be subdivided into a grid — in this case, over the shape of the Earth.
A common approach is to use a longitude/latitude grid (a Cartesian grid), where each cell is defined as the intersection of a longitude and latitude line. This approach can be easily represented on a computer as a rectangular grid, accessible using the longitude and latitude as an ordered pair. It has the advantage of being simple and easy-to-understand. There are two downsides, however. First, there are many more cells near the poles than the equator (oversampling of poles), meaning a larger grid is needed to represent the equator properly. Second, there are two singularities at the poles where the lines of latitude converge and the longitude term loses significance. This requires smaller time steps to assure stability.
Another approach gaining favor uses grids generated by the subdivision of an icosahedron, generated by iteratively bisecting the edges of an icosahedron and projecting the new vertices onto a sphere. In this geodesic grid, each of the vertices in the resulting geodesic sphere corresponds to a cell. The resulting structure can be visualized as cutting twenty triangles from a hexagonal grid and arranging them over the surface of a sphere. Alternatively, using the vertices of the bisected icosahedron directly as vertices in the mesh provides the dual polyhedron of the mesh described above. This triangular mesh is useful for representing the grid graphically.
The geodesic grid inherits many of the virtues of 2D hexagonal grids, and specifically avoids problems with singularities and oversampling near the poles. Along the same line, different Platonic solids could also be used as a starting point instead of an icosahedron — cubes are common in other applications, such as video games.
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.
- Does not result in dense linear systems like spectral methods do (see also Gaussian grid).
- No single points of contact between neighboring grid cells. Square grids and isometric grids suffer from the ambiguous problem of how to handle neighbors that only touch at a single point.
Negative traits
- More complicated to implement than rectangular longitude/latitude grids in computers
History
The earliest use of the (icosahedral) geodesic grid in geophysical modeling dates back to 1968 and the work by Sadourny, Arakawa, and Mintz and Williamson. Later work expanded on this base.
References
External links
- BUGS climate model page on geodesic grids
- Discrete Global Grids page at the Computer Science department at Southern Oregon University
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Friday June 06, 2008 at 09:59:39 PDT (GMT -0700)
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