gridding

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of grid.

   Surveyors were gridding the floodplain before the rainy season began.

   Gridding the elevation readings let the team draw smooth contour lines.

   Note

   The -ing form doubles the final d of grid, as short verbs ending in a single vowel and consonant usually do. It carries every use of the verb: marking something with a grid, assigning it a reference grid, or entering data into one. As a gerund it slides easily into the mapmaker's noun, and once it takes a plural, griddings, it has become that noun outright.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The addition of a grid of intersecting lines to a map, chart, or similar drawing.

   Like the lettered and numbered squares on a chessboard that name every position.

   Gridding the chart allowed surveyors to reference each feature by coordinate.

   Before satellite imagery, gridding was a standard step in producing navigational maps.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The building of a rectangular array of numbers from a set of scattered data points.

   Like filling in a spreadsheet's cells from measurements taken at random spots in a field.

   Gridding produced a regular array from the irregularly spaced soil samples.

   Analysts compared two methods of gridding before mapping the temperature field.

   Similarinterpolation

   Note

   Here the grid is calculated rather than drawn. Values are estimated at evenly spaced intersections from readings taken wherever samples happened to fall, and the resulting array is what contouring and surface-modeling work starts from. The mapmaker's sense adds lines to a finished picture. This kind of gridding comes first, before any map of the data exists.

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