The Use of Bathymetric Data in Society and Science: A Review from the Baltic Sea

Abstract

Bathymetry, the underwater topography, is a fundamental property of oceans, seas, and lakes. As such it is important for a wide range of applications, like physical oceanography, marine geology, geophysics and biology or the administration of marine resources. The exact requirements users may have regarding bathymetric data are, however, unclear. Here, the results of a questionnaire survey and a literature review are presented, concerning the use of Baltic Sea bathymetric data in research and for societal needs. It is demonstrated that there is a great need for detailed bathymetric data. Despite the abundance of high-quality bathymetric data that are produced for safety of navigation purposes, the digital bathymetric models publicly available to date cannot satisfy this need. Our study shows that DBMs based on data collected for safety of navigation could substantially improve the base data for administrative decision making as well as the possibilities for marine research in the Baltic Sea.

Bathymetric properties of the Baltic Sea

“…Characteristic seafloor bedforms, both erosional and depositional, have long been used to provide information on bottom current velocity and flow direction in studies of both modern and past oceanographic conditions (Hollister and Heezen, 1972;Kenyon and Belderson, 1973). With highresolution multibeam bathymetry acquired with surface ves-sels in relatively shallow waters such as in the Baltic Sea, we are able to make use of bedforms scaling from a few decimetres in size at the very best or, more commonly, from a few metres.…”

“…Bendtsen et al, 2009;Gogina and Zettler, 2010;Omstedt et al, 2014;Stigebrandt, 2001; Rolff and Elfwing, 2015), internal mixing in deep waters (Lappe and Umlauf, 2016;Nohr and Gustafsson, 2009), and bottom habitats (Kaskela and Kotilainen, 2017) -are necessary input parameters to many physical and environmental studies. Bathymetry is needed in almost all fields of marine science, preferably compiled into a digital bathymetric model (DBM) suitable for analyses and/or as a framework in numerical models (Hell et al, 2012). A DBM is a digital terrain model (DTM; see Li, 2004) where the terrain specifically represents the seafloor, commonly formatted as a regular grid with depths assigned to the grid cells.…”

The Holocene Great Belt connection to the southern Kattegat, Scandinavia: Ancylus Lake drainage and Early Littorina Sea transgression

“…For high‐resolution bathymetry see Hell et al . () and Baltic Sea Bathymetry Database (). B. Close‐up of the study area where the seismic profiles included in the database used for this study are marked by lines and core locations are shown as grey stars.…”

Leveraging Commercial High-Resolution Multispectral Satellite and Multibeam Sonar Data to Estimate Bathymetry: The Case Study of the Caribbean Sea

“…The problems of the currently available bathymetry datasets for small government departments relate to a lack of spatial resolution, spatial coverage [21], and the temporal frequency of repeatable surveys. SBES, MBES, and LiDAR models capture the spatial resolution required, but not always at the spatial coverage needed and at reasonable costs.…”