Seafloor Mapping for the USGS

Hughes Clarke and Gardner (USGS)

USGS Dept. Interior Funding

The Ocean Mapping Group has been providing guidance and training toward the conduct of large-scale USGS continental shelf mapping projects. This provides a particularly challenging opportunity for software development as the USGS programs take place on a larger scale than any active program in Canada. Furthermore these programs are often critically dependent on backscatter images and thus provide demands not seen with other users.

Unusual demands include:

• Using predicted tides in outer shelf environments.
• Using multi year additions to surveys using either new or software upgraded sonars.
• Requiring unusual vertical data (lake elevations in 1000’s of metres).
• A focus on resolution over accuracy making the problem of dynamic errors particularly pressing.

For recent examples please see:

http://walrus.wr.usgs.gov/pacmaps/site.html