Comparative Study on Map-projection Based and Direct Spherical Tessellation for Global GIS

Shohaku Ko¹
Ryosuke Shibasaki<sup>2


1</sup>Center for Environmental Remote Sensing
Chiba University
Chiba City, Japan
Email: shohaku@ceres.cr.chiba-u.ac.jp

²Center for Spatial Information Science
University of Tokyo
Toyko, Japan
Email: shiba@skl.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp


Global environmental problems have attracted increasingly public attention in recent years. The GIS for managing and handling global environmental information (Global GIS) is expected to be a useful tool in global environmental studies. A tessellation scheme of a spherical surface of the globe forms one of the important basis of a Global GIS especially in using raster data. However, conventional latitude-longitude tessellation scheme has several inconveniences, such as low efficiency in data storage and analysis. After reviewing requirements of spherical tessellation schemes for Global GIS, we propose a set of evaluation indices and make a comprehensive comparison of spherical tessellation schemes, including conventional and proposed ones. Through the comparison, North-Up ZOT projection-based tessellation proposed by the authors is found relatively suitable for Global GIS, especially in applying existing GIS software.