improve cellsize and switch from Archgdal to Proj

[tiemvanderdeure]

Solves #764 and makes cellsize calculation much faster for lon-lat projections.

I'm considering getting rid of the ArchGDAL requirement for these projections as well.

Any ideas for further improvements @rafaqz @alex-s-gardner?

[rafaqz]

How do we get rid of ArchGDAL?

[tiemvanderdeure]

I was thinking we could just make a _crs2transform that just calls ArchGDAL.crs2transform if ArchGDAL is loaded and otherwise tells the user to load ArchGDAL. If the CRS is WGS84 then cellsize would never have to call _crs2transform

[rafaqz]

But how do we deal with Proj/Wkt, a lot of different text strings can be wgs84

[tiemvanderdeure]

But how do we deal with Proj/Wkt, a lot of different text strings can be wgs84

The way we already do it - I don't think this line of code needs ArchGDAL

Rasters.jl/ext/RastersArchGDALExt/cellsize.jl

Line 57 in 8d13c18

if convert(CoordSys, crs(dims)) == CoordSys("Earth Projection 1, 104") # check if need to reproject

[rafaqz]

Yeah that's ArchGDAL doing that conversion ;)

[tiemvanderdeure]

Yeah that's ArchGDAL doing that conversion ;)

I was thrown off by the GeoFormatTypes wrapper, but makes sense. Let's just leave it as it is, then.

[rafaqz]

Yes ArchGDAL actually pirates Base.convert on GeoFormat, so the confusion is understandable. We could put it in a GeoFormatTypesArchGDAL extension now, but that wasn't possible at the time. We could also switch to using Proj.jl directly.

[alex-s-gardner]

Can we take this opportunity to rename cellsize to cellarea and to return area in units of meters #747, also adding a units kwarg?

[alex-s-gardner]

There is room for significant speed gains for small small grid spacing:

#For lat/lon aligned rasters with small grid spacing, this will be much faster and just as accurate:

# load packages
import Rasters: EPSG
using Rasters
using Rasters.Lookups
using DimensionalData


# define meters to lat/lon function
#"""
    meters2lonlat_distance(distance_meters, latitude_degrees)

Returns the decimal degree distance along latitude and longitude lines given a distance in 
meters and a latitude in decimal degrees.

# Example usage:
#```julia-repl
julia> distance_meters = 1000.0;  
julia> latitude_degrees = 45.0;  

julia> lat, lon = Altim.meters2lonlat_distance(distance_meters, latitude_degrees)
(0.008997741566866717, 0.012718328120254203)
#```
#"""
function meters2lonlat_distance(distance_meters, latitude_degrees)
    # Radius of the Earth in meters
    earth_radius = 6371000

    # Calculate the angular distance in radians
    angular_distance = distance_meters / earth_radius

    # Calculate the longitude distance using the Haversine formula
    longitude_distance = angular_distance * (180.0 / π) / cosd(latitude_degrees)

    latitude_distance = distance_meters / 111139

    return latitude_distance, longitude_distance
end

# build an example raster
dX = 0.1
dY = -0.1
lon = X(Projected(166.:dX:168.; sampling=Intervals(Start()), order=ForwardOrdered(), span=Regular(dX), crs=EPSG(4326)))
lat = Y(Projected(-78.0:dY:-80.; sampling=Intervals(Start()), order=ForwardOrdered(), span=Regular(dY ), crs=EPSG(4326)))
ras = Raster(rand(lon, lat))

# given a lat/lon raster with small grid spacing caclculate area
dlon = dims(ras, :X)
dlat = dims(ras, :Y)
lonlat_per_meter = meters2lonlat_distance.(Ref(1), dlat)

dist_lon = step(dlon) ./ getindex.(lonlat_per_meter, 1)
dist_lat = step(dlat) ./ getindex.(lonlat_per_meter, 2)
area = ones(dlon) * DimArray(dist_lon .* dist_lat, dlat)'

[rafaqz]

Can we take this opportunity to rename cellsize to cellarea and to return area in units of meters #747, also adding a units kwarg?

Let's wait for a complete Unitful extension to add the units keyword to everything all at once. (in a few months when my PhD is done 😅)

I'm happy to rename but we should @deprecate the current name so it still works for a while.

[alex-s-gardner]

I'm happy to rename but we should @deprecate the current name so it still works for a while.

given the incorrectness of cellsize it might actually be better to break it

[tiemvanderdeure]

There is room for significant speed gains for small small grid spacing:

Have you compared to the implementation in this PR? For me it is giving similar speeds.

I can see the point of your implementation, but using the haversine formula also has downsides, since it doesn't account for the curvature of the earth. I know this isn't a big deal in most cases, but the error increases with the size of gridcells. So after (dis)aggregating a raster, the total area returned by cellarea would be different, which is not ideal.

Maybe we should implement it for other projections than lon-lat, but then we might need to do some more geometry.

[tiemvanderdeure]

Can we take this opportunity to rename cellsize to cellarea and to return area in units of meters #747, also adding a units kwarg?

Let's wait for a complete Unitful extension to add the units keyword to everything all at once. (in a few months when my PhD is done 😅)

Maybe we should already start returning the result in metres though, to avoid another breaking change down the line. If we add a units keyword later then it would default to m^2.

[rafaqz]

Yeah result in metres is fine, just not the units kw

[alex-s-gardner]

Have you compared to the implementation in this PR? For me it is giving similar speeds.

Your implementation knocks the socks off of my proposal (2x faster) and is more accurate so ignore my recommendation. Excited to see this progressing... fast, useful and intuitive... couldn't ask for anything more

[rafaqz]

Is this good to go?

[tiemvanderdeure]

I think so! Can you or @asinghvi17 just nod at the logic in the line of code that reprojects to mappedcrs? I don't think we need an option to turn that behaviour off, right? I guess users vouch for the accuracy of that transformation by providing a mappedcrs.

[asinghvi17]

Happy to report that this solves #764 in web mercator as well!

[asinghvi17]

Full changelog:

• Switch cellarea and reproject to use Proj instead of ArchGDAL, increasing speed and decreasing the number of allocations.
• Cellarea changes:
  • Rename cellsize to cellarea
  • Return output in meters by default (can be overridden by the radius in the manifold, so Spherical(radius_of_earth_in_km) gives you are in km, for example. This could be made more user friendly in the future.
  • Allow "algorithm choice" using GeometryOpsCore Manifold types (planar / spherical)
  • Use Eriksson's formula for spherical triangle area to compute the area of a grid cell using Cartesian (x, y, z) coordinates for spherical cellarea, increasing precision and providing correct cell area on at least 5mx5m grid cells (could be smaller, haven't tested)
  • Switch to using sind and cosd rather than deg2rad, since they use extended-precision deg2rad internally
  • Use a direct method to get cell area for lat-long (geographic) projections, greatly simplifying the process
• Reproject changes:
  • Switch from transforming vectors of points out-of-place with ArchGDAL to transforming a single array of x or y values in-place with Proj's proj_trans_generic. This drastically reduces allocations and memory usage, and improves runtime by 6x.
  • Use Proj's geographic / degree-unit checks to figure out if the CRS is long-lat. This currently checks explicitly for the "degree" unit name, but this could be expanded in the future.

[tiemvanderdeure]

The test failures are unrelated and already fixed in #780. There is still room for improvement performance-wise but I think we should merge this now. We can make a different PR for further improvements.

[rafaqz]

Thanks everyone!

[alex-s-gardner]

Woot woot ! Fantastic effort.