Brain Log - Think it out. Write it down.

Google Oceans

As many have pointed out Google Earth 5.0 now includes ocean bathymetry!

While this is very cool on a whole host of fronts, their rendering of the data shows how difficult it is to conduct a high-quality bathymetric survey and blend it with other data to create a map that makes sense. They may have started with poor data, but their handling of it is abysmal. Here’s what I mean.

This is the continental shelf just off Virginia Beach. It’s hard to tell if these blips in the bathymetry are a gridding artifacts, a registration artifact with one of the data sets or maybe even a data set with a problematic vertical reference.

Here’s another:

This one is near Cape Hatteras.