An Improved Portrayal of the Floor of the Arctic Ocean, Based on a Grid Derived from GEBCO Bathymetric Contours

• Main Authors: MacNab, Ron, Oakey, Gordon, Vardy, David
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: The International Hydrographic Review 2015
• Subjects: Arctic; Arctic Ocean
• Online Access: https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/ihr/article/view/22970

Digital descriptions of sea floor relief and land topography in the Arctic are useful for scientific and illustrative purposes, however existing public-domain data sets, such as the ET0P05 grid and extracts from the GEBCO Digital Atlas, don’t lend themselves particularly well to visualization and other processes that work best with uniformly-spaced data. A technique has been developed for converting isobaths from the GEBCO Digital Atlas into a uniform 5 km X 5 km grid of depth values. At the same time, the land component of ET0P05 has been re-sampled at a similar grid spacing. When combined, these two grid sets yield convincing shaded relief portrayals of the Arctic region. The methodologies described here are not restricted to the Arctic, but may be applied with minor modification to other regions as well.