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H3 Library

Yellowbrick supports a subset of the H3 geospatial indexing library, which provides a powerful way to partition and query geospatial data on a hexagonal grid. The H3 system divides the surface of the Earth into hexagonal cells at multiple resolutions, making it well suited for analytics on geographic shapes.

H3 is hierarchical: each cell at a given resolution subdivides into seven child cells at the next finer resolution.


Average Hexagon Area by Resolution

The following table shows the approximate average area of a hexagonal cell at each H3 resolution.
Valid resolution values are integers from 0 to 15, inclusive.

ResolutionAverage Hexagon Area (km²)
04,357,449
1609,788
286,801
312,393
41,770
5252
636
75
80.73
90.10
100.015
110.002
120.00030
130.0000438
140.00000626
150.0000008

Actual cell areas vary slightly depending on their position on the globe.


Supported Functions

Yellowbrick currently supports the following functions in its H3 integration:

H3_COVERAGE

Returns a list of H3 cells that cover a given GEOGRAPHY shape at a specified resolution.

H3_POINT_TO_CELL

Returns the H3 cell (as a 64-bit integer) that contains a given point at the specified resolution.

H3_CELL_TO_HEXSTRING

Converts a 64-bit H3 cell ID into its standard hexadecimal string representation.


See Also