An optimized hexagonal quadtree encoding and operation scheme for icosahedral hexagonal discrete global grid systems

Although research on the discrete global grid systems (DGGSs) has become an essential issue in the era of big earth data, there is still a gap between the efficiency of current encoding and operation schemes for hexagonal DGGSs and the needs of practical applications. This paper proposes a novel and efficient encoding and operation scheme of an optimized hexagonal quadtree structure (OHQS) based on aperture 4 hexagonal discrete global grid systems by translation transformation. A vector model is established to describe and calculate the aperture 4 hexagonal grid system. This paper also provides two different grid code addition algorithms based on induction and coordinate transformation. We implement the transformation between OHQS codes and geographic coordinates through the , and coordinate systems. Compared with existing schemes, the scheme in this paper greatly improves the efficiency of the addition operation, neighborhood retrieval and coordinate transformation, and the coding is more concise than other aperture 4 hexagonal DGGSs. The encoding operation based on the coordinate system is faster than the encoding operation based on the induction and addition table. Spatial modeling based OHQS DGGSs are also provided. A case study with rainstorms demonstrated the availability of this scheme.