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Weighting grid-boxes on Earth

Consider a grid cell with latitude boundaries φ1 , φ2 and longitude boundaries


λ1 , λ2 . To find the area, we integrate the zonal arclength across the meridional
arclength spanning the grid cell,
Z aφ2 Z φ2
A= a cos(φ)(λ2 − λ1 ) d(aφ) = a2 cos(φ)(λ2 − λ1 ) dφ
aφ1 φ1

= a2 ∆λ(sin(φ2 ) − sin(φ1 )) (†)

where a is the Earth radius and ∆λ ≡ λ2 −λ1 . From the sum-to-product identity
   
α+β α−β
sin(α) − sin(β) = 2 cos sin
2 2
   
2 φ2 + φ1 φ2 − φ1
=⇒ A = 2a ∆λ cos sin
2 2
= 2a2 ∆λ sin(∆φ/2) cos(φc )
≈ a2 ∆λ∆φ cos(φc ) (∗)

where φc ≡ 0.5(φ1 + φ2 ) is the gridbox central latitude and (∗) is the approxi-
mate Taylor expansion for sine assuming (φ2 − φ1 )/2 is small. For grids with
constant latitude-longitude spacing, this implies grid area is everywhere
proportional to the cosine of the central grid latitude, cos(φc ). Since even
the coarsest grids (say, ∆φ = 10◦ ) will meet only ∼0.1% error (Figure 1), we
never need formula (†).

Cosine latitude approximation vs. exact area weighting


−1
10

−2
10

−3
10
percent error

−4
10

−5
10

−6
10

−7
10
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45
gridbox latitude width (deg)

Figure 1: Fractional error of above approximation for various gridbox latitude


extents.

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