An Improved Gridded Bathymetric Data Set and Tidal Model for the Maldives Archipelago

Abstract

AbstractThe Maldives faces a unique range of environmental challenges. While the country is almost entirely dependent upon oceanic resources with more than 99% of the area covered by ocean, the absence of a suitable bathymetric map of the seafloor of the Maldives severely limits the adoption and application of modern scientific methods for the prediction of both physical and biological oceanic processes across the country. Here, we present a new bathymetric data set for the country based upon accumulating data from various sources and demonstrate that the synthesis of these provides a far more accurate representation of the shallow water areas of the region than currently available products. We also show that the new bathymetric data set is of sufficiently high resolution to model tidal flows across the archipelago for the first time. The new bathymetric data set provides numerous opportunities to better understand oceanic flow, associated physical and biogeochemical processes, and their correlation to one another across the Maldives archipelago.