Constraint-Based Adaptive Grids for Compact Representation of Marine Scalar Fields

Fixed-block representations can obscure heterogeneous local variability in marine scalar fields. We present a deterministic adaptive representation in which anchored dyadic tiles merge under a field-normalized local-range rule and a realized-tile diameter cap. Area-weighted tile values provide lossy reconstruction, whereas exact tile-to-cell membership preserves the link to the authoritative source grid. A profile selected within an evaluated candidate set by Pareto filtering and normalized minimax regret (Pmax=2 and Sth=0.9737439) is fixed before held-out evaluation, with partitions regenerated for each field. In East Sea temperature fields from the Korea Hydrographic and Oceanographic Agency (KHOA) Regional Oceanic Modeling System (ROMS), the method provided a compactness–fidelity compromise whose advantages relative to fixed-block references depended on the metric and block size. Quadtree comparisons showed that similar aggregate losses can accompany different tile boundaries, supporting a transparent representation and calibration framework rather than a universally superior split rule. Salinity and chlorophyll-a cases assessed broader applicability without implying universal parameter transfer. Direct compression with the ZFP and SZ3 scientific-data compressors achieved smaller serialized payloads under the stated benchmark protocol; hybrid coding reduced payload while retaining adaptive topology. The resulting derived layer is designed to support multiresolution visualization, selective transfer, and exploratory analysis without replacing the source grid.