Glossary

Structured mesh

In PyFlowline, structured mesh refers to meshes that have a repeating pattern or structure.

The following meshes are considered as structured:

  1. Projected raster meshes (e.g. 100m by 100m)

  2. GCS-based rectangle meshes (e.g. 0.5 degree by 0.5 degree)

  3. Hexagon meshes (e.g. 100m by edge)

  4. DGGS meshes (e.g., DGGrid meshes)

Unstructured mesh

In PyFlowline, unstructured mesh refers to meshes that don’t have a repeating pattern or structure and the cell size varies from cell to cell.

The following meshes are considered as unstructured:

  1. Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS) meshes

  2. Triangulated irregular network (TIN) meshes

Great circle

In mathematics, a great circle or orthodrome is the circular intersection of a sphere and a plane passing through the sphere’s center point.

DGGS

A discrete global grid (DGG) is a mosaic that covers the entire Earth’s surface. Mathematically it is a space partitioning: it consists of a set of non-empty regions that form a partition of the Earth’s surface. In a usual grid-modeling strategy, to simplify position calculations, each region is represented by a point, abstracting the grid as a set of region-points. Each region or region-point in the grid is called a cell.

TIN

In computer graphics, a triangulated irregular network (TIN) is a representation of a continuous surface consisting entirely of triangular facets (a triangle mesh), used mainly as Discrete Global Grid in primary elevation modeling.

MPAS

Model for Prediction Across Scales.