ESRI grid

An ESRI grid is a raster GIS file format developed by ESRI, which has two formats:
#A proprietary binary format, also known as an "ARC/INFO GRID", "ARC GRID" and "many" other variations
#A non-proprietary ASCII format, also known as an "ARC/INFO ASCII GRID"The formats were introduced for ARC/INFO. The binary format is widely used within ESRI programs, such as ArcGIS, while the ASCII format is used as an exchange, or export format, due to the simple and portable ASCII file structure.

GIS grid

The grid defines geographic space as an array of equally sized square grid points arranged in rows and columns. Each grid point stores a numeric value that represents a geographic attribute (such as elevation or surface slope) for that unit of space. Each grid cell is referenced by its x,y coordinate location.

File formats

ASCII

The format is relatively straight-forward: the first six lines indicate the reference of the grid, followed by the values listed in the order they would naturally appear (left-right, top-down). For example, consider a grid, shown to the right. This could be encoded into an ASCII grid file, that would look like:

where
*"ncols" and "nrows" are the numbers of rows and columns, respectively (represented as integers);
*"xllcorner" and "yllcorner" are the western (left) "x"-coordinate and southern (bottom) "y"-coordinates, such as easting and northing (represented as real numbers with an optional decimal point)
*"cellsize" is the length of one side of a square cell (a real number); and,
*"nodata_value" is the value that is regarded as "missing" or "not applicable"; this line is optional, but highly recommended as some programs expect this line to be declared (a real number).The remainder of the file lists the raster values for each cell, starting at the upper-left corner. These real numbers (with optional decimal point, if needed) and are delimited using a single space character.

Binary format

A binary ESRI grid is stored in several files contained in at least two directories: the "name" directory and an "info" directory, where "name" has strict naming conventions.

References

;Binary grid
* [http://support.esri.com/index.cfm?fa=knowledgebase.techarticles.articleShow&d=30616 Arc/INFO GRID file structure]
* [http://home.gdal.org/projects/aigrid/aigrid_format.html AIG driver] for GDAL;ASCII grid
* [http://ioc.unesco.org/oceanteacher/OMAP/ArcGrid.htm Format specification]
* [http://www.gdal.org/frmt_various.html#AAIGrid AAIGrid driver] for GDAL