On the isolatitude property of the rHEALPix Discrete Global Grid System

Digital Earth frameworks provide a way to integrate,analyze,and visualize large volumes of geospatial data,and the foundation of such frameworks is the Discrete Global Grid System(DGGS).One approach in particular,the rHEALPix DGGS,has the rare property of distribution of cell nuclei along rings of constant latitude(or isolatitude rings).However,this property is yet to be explored.In this paper,we extend existing work on the rHEALPix DGGS by proposing a method to determine the isolatitude ring on which the nucleus of a given cell falls by converting a cell identifier to isolatitude ring without recourse to geodetic coordinates.In addition,we present an efficient method to calculate the geodetic latitude of a cell’s nucleus via its associated isolatitude ring.Lastly,we use the proposed methods to demonstrate how the isolatitude property of the rHEALPix DGGS can be utilized to facilitate latitudinal data analysis at multiple resolutions.