The previous EMODnet Hydrography - Seabed Mapping - Bathymetry projects already made good progress in developing the EMODnet Bathymetry portal to provide overview and access to available bathymetric survey datasets and to generate an harmonised digital bathymetry for Europe's sea basins. Up till September 2016 more than 14.000 bathymetric survey datasets, managed by 27 data centres from 15 countries and originated from more than 150 institutes, have been gathered and populated in the EMODnet Bathymetry Data Discovery and Access service, adopting SeaDataNet standards. These datasets have been used as input for analysing and generating the EMODnet digital terrain model (DTM), for the following sea basins, covering all European marine waters:
- The Atlantic Ocean (Channel, Celtic Seas, Western Approaches)
- The North Sea and Kattegat
- The Western and Central Mediterranean sea and Ionian Sea
- The Iberian Coast and the Bay of Biscay (Atlantic Ocean)
- The Adriatic Sea (Mediterranean)
- The Aegean - Levantine Sea (Mediterranean)
- Madeira and Azores
- Baltic Sea
- Black Sea
- Norwegian - Icelandic Seas
- Canary Islands
This is being extended to include also the European Arctic region and Barentz Sea (available mid 2018). For the Arctic region synergy takes place with the International Bathymetric Chart of the Arctic Ocean (IBCAO) project of IHO and IOC. Also the cooperation as established in the earlier EMODnet projects with the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO) and the Baltic Sea Bathymetry Database project of the Baltic Sea Hydrographic Commission (BSHC) are continued.
The Bathymetry Viewing and Download service gives users wide functionality for viewing and downloading the EMODnet digital bathymetry:
- water depth in gridded form on a DTM grid of 1/8 arc minute of longitude and latitude
- option to view QC parameters of individual DTM cells and references to source data
- option to download DTM tiles in different formats: ESRI ASCII, XYZ, CSV, NetCDF (CF),GeoTiff and SD for Fledermaus 3D viewer software
- OGC web services (WMS, WMTS, WFS and WCS) for sharing with other portals.
The NetCDF (CF) DTM files are fit for use in a special 3D Viewer software package which is based on the existing open source NASA World Wind JSK application. It has been developed in the frame of the EU FP7 Geo-Seas project (another sibling of SeaDataNet for marine geological and geophysical data) and is freely available. The 3D viewer also supports the ingestion of WMS overlay maps.
The EMODnet consortium is actively seeking cooperation with additional Hydrographic Offices, research institutes, authorities and private organisations for more data sets (single and multibeam surveys, sounding tracks, composite products) to contribute to an even better geographical coverage.
These datasets will be used for upgrading and extending the EMODnet regional Digital Terrain Models (DTM). The datasets themselves are not distributed but described in the metadata service, giving clear information about the background survey data used for the DTM, their access restrictions, originators and distributors and facilitating requests by users to originators.
This way the portal provides originators of bathymetric data sets an attractive shop window for promoting their data sets to potential users, without losing control.
As part of the new EMODnet HRSM project the partnership has been expanded and includes now 40 data providers. In this new project phase the following extra developments will be undertaken:
- Expanding the DTM to include also coastal areas, gathering extra surveys for the coastal zones
- Increasing the overall resolution to a common DTM resolution of 1/16 arc minute of longitude and latitude
- Includin
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