An improved gridded bathymetric data set and tidal model for the Maldives Archipelago
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Rasheed, Shuaib
Warder, Simon C
Plancherel, Yves
Piggott, Matthew D
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
The Maldives faces a unique range of environmental challenges. While the country is almost entirely dependent upon oceanic resources with more than 99% of the area covered by ocean, the absence of a suitable bathymetric map of the seafloor of the Maldives severely limits the adoption and application of modern scientific methods for the prediction of both physical and biological oceanic processes across the country. Here, we present a new bathymetric data set for the country based upon accumulating data from various sources and demonstrate that the synthesis of these provides a far more accurate representation of the shallow water areas of the region than currently available products. We also show that the new bathymetric data set is of sufficiently high resolution to model tidal flows across the archipelago for the first time. The new bathymetric data set provides numerous opportunities to better understand oceanic flow, associated physical and biogeochemical processes, and their correlation to one another across the Maldives archipelago.
Date Issued
2021-05
Date Acceptance
2021-04-14
Citation
Earth and Space Science, 2021, 8 (5), pp.1-15
ISSN
2333-5084
Publisher
American Geophysical Union (AGU)
Start Page
1
End Page
15
Journal / Book Title
Earth and Space Science
Volume
8
Issue
5
Copyright Statement
© 2021. The Authors.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
License URL
Identifier
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020EA001207
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2021-05-14