General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans – GEBCO – A look at the world from an ocean’s perspective
The aim of the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO) is nothing less than to provide the most up-to-date, authoritative, publicly-available bathymetry data sets for the world’s oceans. Under the joint auspices of the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO, experts from around the world contribute time and effort to continuously update and improve GEBCO. Initiated in 1903 by an international group of geographers and oceanographers, under the leadership of Prince Albert I of Monaco, GEBCO has moved from a series of maps describing the shape of the ocean floor to digital maps and digital bathymetric models to be used in geographical information systems. The latest GEBCO product is a global gridded raster data set with a resolution of 30 arc seconds (GEBCO_2014 Grid). These days, GEBCO is an important data set for ocean sciences providing key base data for e.g. ocean modeling and ecosystem studies. GEBCO’s gridded bathymetric data can be downloaded from the British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) http://www.bodc.ac.uk/projects/international/gebco/