Flex Grid

In addition to the direct benefit of sweet spot mapping, adding gridding capability to Spotfire allows users to quickly create and generate grids directly in Spotfire on any attribute, and to generate predictive maps without a dependency on a geological platform.

A requirement to create a grid is that the data must be in a projected coordinate system. For this reason, if the data you want to grid is in a geographic coordinate system (latitude / longitude), we provide a Coordinate Conversion to calculate X and Y columns for your input data.

The flex gridding algorithm creates a grid surface that must accomplish two criteria:

  1. The interpolated surface must pass through, or at least quite close to, the data in XYZ space.

  2. The RMS curvature of the surface must be as small as is possible without violating criterion 1

The approach is to evaluate a series of differential equation operator located at an empty grid node. Centered at an empty grid node, two operators work only on a subset of local control points. One operator calculates minimum curvature, the other calculates minimum tension. The solution initially is a local calculator of a datum from which the grid is derived. These operators are applied to each grid node iteratively, converging to a minimum curvature surface.

To grid a surface from a table:

  1. Right-click on any table with X and Y columns and select. IHS Markit Analytics Explorer > Flex Gridding

  2. Under Input Table, select the X, Y, and attribute columns. If the column headers for the X and Y columns are recognized, these columns will be selected. However, you can change if required.

  3. Specify the Flex gridding parameters (tension, smoothness) and output cell size.

Analytics Explorer will create a heat map and scatter plot of the selected attribute based on the XY values. Generate, view, and adjust the grid parameters to produce the optimal results, for example, add additional smoothing.

  • Kingdom users can save the grid surface back to the Kingdom project.

  • Harmony users can add the grid as a layer to their map.