Abstract

ESRI Applications in Bathymetry Modeling
Track: Defense and Intelligence
Authors: James Beale, Gary Wallace

In support of military and civilian applications, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has developed a standard digital data set which is a uniform matrix of bathymetry and elevation values to provide basic quantitative data for systems and applications that require global bathymetry and elevation, slope, and/or surface roughness information . In conjunction with this directive NGA has built, and continues to build an Oracle database of worldwide bathymetry which currently contains well over one billion soundings. Bathymetric analysis protocols has been greatly enhanced via ERSI tools. Statistical methods for finding erroneous soundings must be applied carefully as not to remove actual topography. Visualization tools are indispensible, and the ability of ArcGIS to create raster maps from hundreds of millions of points, construct shapefiles of polygons, and find coordinate envelopes with simple ArcObject commands has been used to great effect.