Department Urban Water Management

Software tools for hexagonal grids

This project aims to deliver a series of tools to facilitate the manipulation and usage of hexagonal raster grids. These tools rely on the Hexagonal ASCII file format (or HASC for short) for the physical storage of hexagonal rasters.

The tools available at this time:

• hasc2gml - from an input HASC file creates a GML file with a vector feature for each hexagonal cell. Simplifies the display of hexagonal rasters in common desktop GIS software.
• asc2hasc - creates an HASC file from an input ESRI ASCII grid. It can either preserve cell area or approximate spatial resolution.
• surface2hasc – creates an HASC file from a continuous surface function (still in development).

These tools are relevant assets in the employment of hexagonal grids in the fields of geomorphometry and hydrogeomatics. They are being used, for instance, in the HexCADDIES project.

The HexUtils source code is hosted at GitHub. The tool suite can be installed from the PyPi repository.

Future work includes the development of a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for these tools on QGIS, making the usage of hexagonal grids even simpler.