Abstract:
Modern environmental monitoring and modeling requires a good global
grid system for survey sampling and accurate, spatially complete data
collection of relevant environmental phenomena. A prime requirement for the
global grid system is that the global sampling grids be regular and equal in area
and have minimal shape distortion. None of the existing global partitioning
approaches meets this or other criteria. The Synder projection is the only
method to retain equal-area grids, but the shape distortion is high. After review
of the existing approaches to partitioning the earth's surface, we propose a new
equal area global partitioning method based upon small circle edges on the
earth's surface, which we call the small circle subdivision method. The small
circle subdivision method creates the sampling grids which are equal in area
and have a much smaller shape distortion than those in the Synder projection.
This method has been proved to be the best so far to achieve the essential criteria for a global grid. In this paper, a detailed implementation of this method,
including its mathematical derivation, numerical implementation and analysis of
results, are conducted. A comprehensive comparison of the method with other
five traditional global partitioning methods are performed.
