Constraint-Based Adaptive Grids for Compact Representation of Marine Scalar Fields

Abstract

Fixed-block representations can obscure heterogeneous local variability in marine scalar fields. We present a deterministic adaptive representation in which anchored dyadic tiles merge under a field-normalized local-range rule and a realized-tile diameter cap. Area-weighted tile values provide lossy reconstruction, whereas exact tile-to-cell membership preserves the link to the authoritative source grid. A profile selected within an evaluated candidate set by Pareto filtering and normalized minimax regret (Pmax=2 and Sth=0.9737439) is fixed before held-out evaluation, with partitions regenerated for each field. In East Sea temperature fields from the Korea Hydrographic and Oceanographic Agency (KHOA) Regional Oceanic Modeling System (ROMS), the method provided a compactness–fidelity compromise whose advantages relative to fixed-block references depended on the metric and block size. Quadtree comparisons showed that similar aggregate losses can accompany different tile boundaries, supporting a transparent representation and calibration framework rather than a universally superior split rule. Salinity and chlorophyll-a cases assessed broader applicability without implying universal parameter transfer. Direct compression with the ZFP and SZ3 scientific-data compressors achieved smaller serialized payloads under the stated benchmark protocol; hybrid coding reduced payload while retaining adaptive topology. The resulting derived layer is designed to support multiresolution visualization, selective transfer, and exploratory analysis without replacing the source grid.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Remote Sensing, 2026 · DOI ↗