SeaZone Digital Survey Bathymetry

Bathymetry describes the water depth relative to sea level and hence the height and shape of the seabed underlying the World’s oceans and seas. Knowledge of bathymetry is essential to many marine activities, such as coastal and offshore engineering, shoreline protection, environment and ecology, fishing, civil security and emergency response planning.

Historically, the primary source of bathymetry has been the nautical chart. However, as charts are designed to aid the safety of navigation they do not truly represent the real world. Overall water depths may be up to several metres shallower than in reality; this is known as shoal bias. Depth contours are generalised and simplified for easy reading, and in some instances missing and broken contours are apparent. Scant information is available in many areas, where there is little or no risk of grounding. This lack of detail makes charted bathymetry unsuitable for many applications, including environmental modelling and engineering design, where more accurate and detailed depth information is required.

SeaZone’s Digital Survey Bathymetry offers an unprecedented solution to obtaining detailed and accurate depth information of the seabed. It provides survey data that has been collected digitally, or captured from paper survey sheets, often known as ‘fair sheets’ and quality controlled at the UK Hydrographic Office and other leading institutions.

Depending on the method used for the survey, the detail contained in these datasets is far greater than that shown on a typical chart. For the creation of surface models, for volumetric or rate of change calculations or as input to hydrodynamic and environmental models, this accuracy and level of detail is absolutely critical to the confidence that the user has in the results.

Presently, SeaZone has limited coverage of UK Waters and overseas. However, as more data is being captured and made available, the area of coverage is expanding. Where there are gaps in coverage, SeaZone offers largest scale charted data in the same format to infill the survey bathymetry, thereby providing complete coverage for your application.

SeaZone may also undertake the capture of data from paper surveys sheets.

For more information about bathymetry.

Data Availability.

Coordinate System

SeaZone Hydrospatial is supplied as standard in:

Other datums and projections are available on request and may be subject to additional costs.

For more information about coordinates.

Format

SeaZone Digital Survey Bathymetry and infill Digital Charted Bathymetry data is supplied in ASCII XYZ file format (i.e. .xyz file) as standard. A surfer blanking file (i.e. bln file) is supplied to mask land areas as required, this is based on the S57 coastline.

The dataset will also include an appropriately attributed extents file indicating clearly the source of the information. This will be provided in Cadcorp BDS, ESRI Shapefile and MapInfo TAB file formats.

For more information about GIS formats.

Sample Data CD Request Form

Quotation Request Form

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