ISPRS-Archives The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences ISPRS-Archives Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci. 2194-9034 Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/isprsarchives-XL-4-W2-39-2013 A Global "<i>Natural</i>" Grid Modeling Method Based on Terrain Topological Structure Wang H. B. 1 Zhao X. S. 1 Wang L. 1 Ma X. N. 1 Geoscience and Surveying Engineering College, China University of Mining and Technology (Beijing), Beijing, China 25 10 2013 XL-4/W2 39 44 Copyright: © 2013 H. B. Wang et al. 2013 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XL-4-W2/39/2013/isprs-archives-XL-4-W2-39-2013.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XL-4-W2/39/2013/isprs-archives-XL-4-W2-39-2013.pdf

In this paper, a Global "<i>Natural</i>" Grid (GNG) modeling method based on the terrain topological structure is proposed. GNG partitions the earth surface into "<i>natural</i>" cells by using the natural terrain feature elements, which may be more suitable for exploring and understanding some natural phenomena in the environment monitoring, hydrological analysis, species distribution, etc. This modeling method mainly consists of three steps: firstly, a variable-resolution geometric representation of global DEMs based on the restricted quadtree is constructed; secondly, the feature elements are extracted and an original GNG model is built; finally, a multi-resolution representation of GNG is established by recursively applying topological simplification. In the end, an experiment is done to validate the correctness and feasibility of this modeling method.