The GEBCO_2019 Grid - a continuous terrain model of the global oceans and land.

The GEBCO_2019 Grid is a global continuous terrain model for ocean and land with a spatial resolution of 15 arc seconds. The grid uses as a base Version 1 of the SRTM15_plus data set (Sandwell et al). This data set is a fusion of land topography with measured and estimated seafloor topography. It is largely based on version 11 of SRTM30_plus (5). Included on top of this base grid are gridded bathymetric data sets developed by the four Regional Centers of The Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project, and from a number of international and national data repositories and regional mapping initiatives. The GEBCO_2019 Grid represents all data within the 2019 compilation. The compilation of the GEBCO_2019 Grid was carried out at the Seabed 2030 Global Center, hosted at the National Oceanography Centre, UK, with the aim of producing a seamless global terrain model. The majority of the compilation was done using the remove-restore procedure (Smith and Sandwell, 1997; Becker, Sandwell and Smith, 2009 and Hell and Jakobsson, 2011). This is a two stage process of computing the difference between the new data and the base grid and then gridding the difference and adding the difference back to the existing base grid. The aim is to achieve a smooth transition between the new and base data sets with the minimum of perturbation of the existing base data set. The data sets supplied in the form of complete grids (primarily areas north of 60N and south of 50S) were included using feather blending techniques from GlobalMapper software. The GEBCO_2019 Grid has been developed through the Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project. This is a collaborative project between the Nippon Foundation of Japan and the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO). It aims to bring together all available bathymetric data to produce the definitive map of the world ocean floor by 2030 and make it available to all. Funded by the Nippon Foundation, the four Seabed 2030 Regional Centers include the Southern Ocean - hosted at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany; South and West Pacific Ocean - hosted at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, New Zealand; Atlantic and Indian Oceans - hosted at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, USA; Arctic and North Pacific Oceans - hosted at Stockholm University, Sweden and the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping at the University of New Hampshire, USA).