News
All Australian coastal waters mapped in 100 m resolution
This ‘SDB-Update’ #1 is the start of EOMAP’s new post series on Satellite-Derived Bathymetry (SDB): Enjoy news, facts, and figures on a bi-weekly basis!
Australia’s coastline of ~36,000 km with a further ~24,000 km of island coastlines, is fascinating, extremely manifold, and often highly dynamic.
SDB of Australia – Great Sandy Straits
We have now completed SDB-mapping of the shallow waters “down under” in 100-m resolution.
The continent is surrounded by the Pacific, the Indian, and the Southern (Antarctic) Oceans, and the shallow waters offer both challenging and ideal conditions for SDB:
🌊 High-wave areas
📍 Rocky and sandy coasts
🐠 Coral reefs
📍 Varied tidal ranges, including +10 m tides in the Northwest!
💦 Clear and turbid waters
📍 Strong sandbank dynamics, calling for frequent monitoring
For this 100 m dataset, we applied wave kinematics bathymetry and optical SDB processing, both based on Copernicus ECMWF Sentinel-2 satellite imagery. These data support both environmental modelling, and international initiatives such as Seabed 2030, EMODnet Bathymetry, or GEBCO – General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans.
SDB-mapping in Australia by EOMAP goes a long way
It also includes some ‘firsts’:
1️⃣ In 2009, we were the first to map Ningaloo (Nyinggulu), the world’s largest fringing reef in Western Australia in very high resolution.
Read more in the paper by Halina Kobryn et al..
1️⃣ In 2013, we provided the first very high-resolution SDB covering the entire ‘unmappable’ Great Barrier Reef.
Read more in this article at deepreef.org.
1️⃣ In 2019, the Australian Hydrographic Office adopted SDB in their survey toolbox. Meanwhile, EOMAP high-resolution data have been integrated into official Australian charts and AusSeabed bathymetry grids (30 m).
Contact us
Get in touch with our Australian team for more success stories and SDB services in Australia and APAC.
Learn more about SDB here.
The image shows a detail of the 100 m resolution bathymetry result for the area of Great Sandy Straits on the east coast of Australia.