Abstract. The WGS84 ellipsoid is tessellated using quadrilaterals of roughly the same size. The tessellation scheme is developed for the purpose of storing, distributing and analysing global as well as local digital terrain models. Compared with DTED, the new grid has a more uniform distribution of cell sizes. This equal area property of the tiles of the grid is an attractive characteristic in geostatistical and wavelet analysis of the terrain model

Jan T. Bjørke