Compiling Multibeam Sonar data for the U.S. Pacific West Coast Extended Continental Shelf Project

The United States Extended Continental Shelf (ECS) Project is a multi-agency collaboration whose goals are to determine and define a potential extension of the U.S. continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles (nmi). Under international law as reflected in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), every coastal state is entitled to a continental shelf out to 200 nmi (the Exclusive Economic Zone) from its coastal baseline or out to a maritime boundary with another coastal country. The extended continental shelf (ECS) is the area that lies beyond this 200 nm limit where a country could gain sovereign rights to the resources of the seafloor and sub-seafloor. In 2007, the U.S. ECS Task Force designated NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) as the Data Management lead for the U.S. ECS Project and the data stewards and archival location for all data related to this project. The process to determine the outer limits of the ECS requires the collection and analysis of data that describe the depth, shape, and geophysical characteristics of the seafloor and sub-seafloor, as well as the thickness of the underlying sediments. The specific types of data that need to be collected include bathymetric data, seismic profiles, magnetic and gravity data, and other geophysical data. NGDC maintains several global geophysical databases, including bathymetric, seismic and geological data, all critical for supporting ECS analysis. Multibeam bathymetry is a primary dataset used for ECS analysis. Since 2003, the U.S. has collected more than 1.65 million square kilometers of multibeam bathymetric data from 18 cruises. One area where new data has been collected and where the U.S. may have an extended continental shelf is off the U.S. Pacific West Coast. New and old multibeam bathymetry archived at and delivered by NGDC were individually gridded by survey for an area within 48-30 degrees north latitude and -140 and -115 west longitude at a resolution of 210 meters. The individual surveys were compiled to form a comprehensive grid of the entire region, which covers an area of approximately 1,110,000 square kilometers. Applications such as MB-System, Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL), Generic Mapping Tools (GMT), and Fledermaus were used to grid, compile, and visualize the data. This study focuses on the gridding methods, compilation, and pitfalls of creating a large-scale multibeam sonar grid for use on a single region of the U.S ECS project.