Icosahedral Earth

This post is basically an exercise in using the WebGL facility, with colorful results. It's also the start of some new methods, hopefully. I wrote a while ago about improved gridding methods for integrating surface temperatures. The improvement was basically a scheme for estimating missing cells based on neighbors, and an important enabling feature was a grid that had more uniform cells than the conventional lat/lon grid. I used a cubed sphere - a projection of a gridded cube surface onto the sphere. The corners of the cube are a slight irregularity, that can be mitigated by non-linear scaling of the grid spacing. The cubed sphere has become popular lately - GFDL use it for their GCMs. It worked well for me.

In that earlier post, Victor Venema suggested using an icosahedron instead. This has less irregularity at the vertices, since the solid angle is greater, and the distortion of mapping to a sphere less. The geometry is a bit less familiar than the cube, but quite manageable.

A few days ago, I described methods now built into the facility for mapping triangles that occur in convex hull meshing actually onto the spherical surface. This is basically what is needed to make a finer icosahedral mesh. In this post, I'll use that as provided, but won't do the subdivision - that is for another post.

I also wanted to try another capability. The basic requirement of the facility is that you supply a set of nodes, nodal values (for shading), and links which are a set of pointers to the nodes and declare triangles, line segments etc. From that comes continuous shading, which is usually what is wanted. But WebGL does triangles individually, and you can color them independently. You just regard the nodes of reach triangle as being coincident with others, but having independent values. For the WebGL facility, that means that for each triangle you give a separate copy of the nodal coordinates and a separate corresponding value, and the links point to the appropriate version of the node.

So I thought I should try that in practice, and yes, it works. The colors look better if you switch off the map - checkbox top right. So here is the icosahedral globe, with rather random colors for shading: