| Abstract |
The previous EMODnet Hydrography - Seabed Mapping - Bathymetry - High Resolution Seabed Mapping projects since 2008 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 end 2018 more than 27.000 bathymetric survey datasets, managed by 42 data centres from 20 countries and originated from more than 260 institutes from 1800 till 2018, 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 and Icelandic Seas
- Canary Islands
- European arctic region and Barentz Sea
The cooperation as established in the earlier EMODnet projects with
the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO), the Baltic Sea
Bathymetry Database project of the Baltic Sea Hydrographic Commission
(BSHC), the North Sea Hydrographic Commission (NSHC), and the International Bathymetric Chart of the Arctic Ocean (IBCAO), project of IHO and IOC, is 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 1/16 arc minute of longitude and latitude
- option to retrieve depth parameters per location and references to source data
- option to view and interrogate a source reference layer
- option to view and switch on multiple map layers and to interrogate each for their
information, when activated
- 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
- option for viewing the EMODnet DTM in 3D
- option for plotting a depth profile along a defined transect.
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.
The new EMODnet HRSM2 project |
