AN IMPROVED PORTRAYAL OF THE FLOOR OF THE ARCTIC-OCEAN, BASED ON A GRID DERIVED FROM GEBCO BATHYMETRIC CONTOURS

Digital descriptions of sea floor relief and land topography in the Ar ctic are useful for scientific and illustrative purposes, however exis ting public-domain data sets, such as the ETOP05 grid and extracts fro m the GEBCO Digital Atlas, don't lend themselves particularly well to visualization and other processes that work best with uniformly-spaced data. A technique has been developed for converting isobaths from the GEBCO Digital Atlas into a uniform 5 km X 5 km grid of depth values. At the same time, the land component of ETOP05 has been re-sampled at a similar grid spacing. When combined, these two grid sets yield convi ncing shaded relief portrayals of the Arctic region. The methodologies described here are not restricted to the Arctic, but may be applied w ith minor modification to other regions as well.