On grid generation for numerical models of geophysical fluid dynamics

A simple geometric condition that defines the class of classical (stereographic, conic and cylindrical) conformal mappings from a sphere onto a plane is derived. The problem of optimization of computational grid for spherical domains is solved in an entire class of conformal mappings on spherical (geodesic) disk. The characteristics of computational grids of classical mappings are compared for different spherical radii of geodesic disk. For a rectangular computational domain, the optimization problem is solved in the class of classical mappings and respective area of the spherical domain is evaluated.