IBCSO V1.0 – New Bathymetry for the SCAR Community

The SCAR expert group on the International Bathymetric Chart of the Southern Ocean (IBCSO) was inaugurated in 2004. IBCSO is a regional mapping project of the General Bathymetric Chart of the Ocean (GEBCO) under the joint auspices of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) (of UNESCO) and the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO). The project aim was to create the first seamless bathymetric compilation for the entire Southern Ocean south of 60°S. In 2013, finally the first Version of IBCSO was published in the Journal Geophysical Research Letters (Arndt et al., 2013). IBCSO Version 1.0 is a prime example for an international collaboration in Antarctic Science. Over 30 institutions from 15 countries contributed data and shared their expertise to generate the, so far, largest database of bathymetric data of the Southern Ocean. From this database a digital bathymetric model (DBM) was produced. The DBM covers the entire Antarctic Treaty area in a resolution of 500 m. It is available in several formats and projections. In addition, a new map has been created of the Southern Ocean and Antarctica and now is also available to the SCAR community. Both, the DBM and the map, can be downloaded free of charge from the IBCSO web site (www.ibcso.org). In my presentation I will give an overview of the IBCSO V1.0 compilation methods and highlight the improvements of the IBCSO DBM compared to global datasets. Furthermore, some tips and hints for the usage of IBCSO including the use of the Source Identifier grid (SID) will be given.