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I have used a "proprietary" 3 dimensional shape for dividing the Earth's surface into similar sized areas of about 1000 km2. It is a icosahedron (or maybe a pentakis dodecahedron) with the triangles subdivided many times and then their vertices used as the center of the hexagons / pentagons.

Screenshot of Energy Explorer from TheWorldSim

I have used the areas described by these hexagons/pentagons for downscaling wind and solar power data for a simulation on sustainable energy production. I was wondering if there are any existing open standards for such 3d shapes so that the data and applications I produce are useful and interoperable for others. I would like to use as robust, interoperable and accepted area/coordinate system as possible and whilst I am happy to create my own I'm wondering if there is one or more of those that exist already that I could choose from.

The areas can be perhaps up to 2000 km2 or down to 100 m2, but they need to be a repeating pattern of areas of very similar size over the whole globe (which rules out What3Words... also they do not provide an open standard.

For completeness, the wind and solar data you can see in the screenshot and linked to video is currently stored in a csv like this where the latitude and longitude of the triangle vertices i.e. the hexagon/pentagon centers, are used as the "primary key".

AJP
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    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrete_global_grid#Standard_equal-area_hierarchical_grids might be helpful, but I've been looking for something like this for a while and haven't found anything I really like. – Barry Carter May 24 '22 at 02:42
  • Thanks @barrycarter what have you seen out there already? What are your use cases? It would be great if you wanted to co-create something if we have similar use cases? – AJP May 25 '22 at 09:59
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    I'm trying to create an equal area tiling of Earth that's zoomable (each equal area tile can be split into "identical" subtiles) and "looks nice" which is obviously opinion-based. It's easy to equal area tile the plane using squares, hexagons, and probably other figures, but spheres seem to be way more difficult. – Barry Carter May 26 '22 at 11:05
  • Got it. Is there a public repo you are working on this stuff? I'm on github.com/centerofci/sustainability-sims at the moment. But the screnshot is of data from https://github.com/TheWorldSim/world-sim-data – AJP May 31 '22 at 13:27
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    Nothing to repo at the moment, but yours looks interesting. I've been talking about creating world-based games for ages, good to see someone's done it. – Barry Carter May 31 '22 at 13:45
  • Awesome! Well please feel free to get involved @barrycarter and experiment with writing some code, or try out the app(s) and give your feedback, or join the slack channel: https://join.slack.com/t/theworldsim/shared_invite/zt-1a04kzi8k-UPYHSJUVwCJttJsgwUnz_A We (humanity) need a lot more people working on these projects!... really anything you want to contribute I am sure would be very much welcomed. – AJP May 31 '22 at 19:51
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    Thought: if you use an equal-area rectangular projection such as Behrmann, any equal area plane tiling would work. However, they may look very ugly when reprojected to a globe. – Barry Carter Jun 04 '22 at 14:00

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