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When modeling the weather, ocean circulation, or the climate, partial differential equations are used to describe the evolution of the model used. In using a computer to approximate these equations, they must be discretized; finite differences are a popular choice. Finite differences require a grid to be laid down on the ___domain of interest -- in this case, the shape of the earth.
One traditional approach is to use grids generated by triangular refinement of an icosahedron. The original works of the use of the icosahedral grid in the geophysical problem date back to Williamson (1968) and Sadourny et al. (1968). These works were followed by (Williamson, 1969; Cullen, 1974; Cullen and Hall, 1979; Masuda and Ohnishi, 1986).
As an alternative, icosahedral–hexagonal grids have been developed to discretize weather and climate models. They are based on truncated icosahedra and dodecahedra. In the 1990s, several research groups have developed icosahedral gridpoint general circulation models using their own new techniques. A few examples are GME of Deutscher Wetterdienst for the numerical prediction model (Majewski et al., 2002)., ICON GCM: ICOsahedral Non-hydrostatic General Circulation Model joint project between Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) and the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD), CSU AGCM (Atmospheric General Circulation Model) at Colorado State University (Heikes and Randall 1995a, b; Randall et al., 2000, Randall et al., 2002; Ringler et al., 2000) and Nonhydrostatic Icosahedral Atmospheric model of Frontier Research Center for Global Change (Tomita et al., 2001, 2002; Tomita and Satoh, 2004).
See also
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