Coastal Services Center

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Bathymetric/Topographic Digital Elevation Model

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Digital Elevation Model

As part of the Coastal Storms Program, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will be developing a vertical datum transformation tool that will enable seamless integration of bathymetric and topographic data. This tool, called VDatum, is being developed nationally through regional applications such as this project for Southern California. Vertical elevation data may be input to VDatum and converted among approximately 30 different tidal, orthometric and ellipsoidal datums. This allows data which may be referenced to different vertical datums to be combined seamlessly through appropriate transformations. A digital elevation model (DEM) will use VDatum to combine available topographic and bathymetric data in Southern California into a gridded product across the land-sea interface.

How the Project Will Work

The vertical datum software application for Southern California will be provided to federal, state, county, and local coastal resource and emergency planners for use in their coastal applications. Since the software will be publicly available, this information will also greatly improve available shoreline information for geographic information system users and modelers in the region. The properly merged bathymetric/topographic DEM will be vital to a number of applications—including the evaluation of the impacts of coastal storms related to erosion and accretion, as well as modeling studies of the inundation associated with storm surge and tsunamis. The tide models developed for computing tidal datum fields in the vertical datum transformation tool can be extended to experiment with storm surge simulations in the Southern California Bight.

For Additional Information

Edward Myers
NOAA National Ocean Service
Coast Survey Development Laboratory
Telephone: (301) 713-2809, ext.107
E-mail: Edward.Myers@noaa.gov