Geodesic grid

The earliest use of the (icosahedral) geodesic grid in geophysical modeling dates back to 1968 and the work by Sadourny, Arakawa, and Mintz[1] and Williamson.

[9] Primarily, the cells' area and shape are generally similar, especially near the poles where many other spatial grids have singularities or heavy distortion.

A geodesic grid allows local to global assimilation of ecologically significant information at its own level of granularity.

[13] When modeling the weather, ocean circulation, or the climate, partial differential equations are used to describe the evolution of these systems over time.

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.

Screenshot of PYXIS WorldView showing an ISEA geodesic grid .
A variation of geodesic grid with adaptive mesh refinement which devotes higher resolution mesh at regions of interests increasing the simulation precision while keeping the memory footage at manageable size. [ 12 ]