Project expanded for additional maritime regions

10 June 2010

The EU has awarded a new contract for the EMODnet Hydrography consortium for extending the initial coverage of maritime regions (Greater North Sea, Celtic Seas, Channel, Westen and Eastern Mediterranean) with 3 additional maritime regions:

• Iberian Coast and Bay of Biscay (Atlantic Ocean)
• Adriatic Sea (Mediterranean)
• Aegean - Levantine Sea (Mediterranean)

The consortium will gather and collate also for these regions metadata and survey data that will be used as basis for producing Digital Terrain Models that will be made available for viewing and downloading without any restriction to users.

The new contract also includes making an assessment of the total available coverage of the European maritime regions by multibeam surveys and an estimate of the total effort (in time and money) required to map the deep and shallow waters at high resolution.

The EMODnet Hydrography Consortium previously consisted of MARIS (NL), ATLIS (NL), IFREMER (FR), SHOM (FR), IEO (ES), GSI (IE), and NERC-NOC (UK). It has been expanded as part of the new contract and now also includes OGS (IT), HCMR (GR), and UNEP/GRID-Arendal.

Further arrangements will be explored and made with additionally identified data providers that will contribute to the DTM production process and that will list their datasets in the metadata - data access service which serves them as a shopwindow to interest and serve potential users of their survey data sets.