TCarta Marine, a global provider of hydrospatial products and services, has delivered three major satellite-derived bathymetry (SDB) data sets to The Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 project.

Students in Canada participating in a 2023 summer internship program created the SDB products for the entire coastline of Madagascar, Newfoundland, and two Canadian Arctic research areas.

TCarta co-sponsored the first-of-its-kind SDB internship in cooperation with Seabed 2030 and the Marine Institute (MI) of Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada. Held at the MI Ocean Mapping facility in St. John’s, the program instructed six undergraduate and two graduate hydrography students in the use of SDB processes, satellite Earth observation platforms, advanced sensor systems and artificial intelligence for seafloor mapping.

Processing government and commercial multispectral satellite imagery, the 2023 summer interns generated 10-m-resolution SDB data to depths of 25 m along the Madagascar coast, 20 m in Newfoundland, and 7 to 8 m in the Canadian Arctic locations. NASA ICESat-2 LiDAR data were used for validation, a new technique developed by TCarta.

Coastal Madagascar was a challenge due to its geographic size and shallow-water turbidity, while the murky Arctic waters were difficult due to several factors, including the scarcity of ice-free satellite images.

In recent years, TCarta has significantly enhanced the utility of SDB technology in turbid, murky water conditions, leveraging grants from the National Science Foundation and NOAA.

Learn more here.