In accordance with SO #3423 - The Gulf of America and SO #3424 - Mount McKinley and Landmarks Honoring the Alaskan People, new USGS data releases specific to those named places will utilize the new name Gulf of America and the restored name Mount McKinley. Per USGS practice, historical data will retain the name of the geographic features as they were known at the time the data were originally released.
Data Release
Historical Bathymetry in the Mississippi-Alabama Coastal Region: Bathymetric Soundings, Gridded Digital Elevation Model, and Hydrographic Sheets
By Joseph F. Terrano,1 Kathryn E.L. Smith,2 Amanda L. Muni-Morgan,2,3 Noreen A. Buster,2 and Forrest Foxen2,3
1 Cherokee Nation System Solutions contracted to the U.S. Geological Survey
2 U.S. Geological Survey
3 University of South Florida, St. Petersburg
Summary
Hydrographic sheets (H-sheets) and nautical charts produced by the National Ocean Service (NOS) during the 1800s provide historic sounding (water depth) measurements of coastal areas. The data can be vectorized into a geographic information system (GIS), adjusted to a modern vertical datum, and converted into a digital elevation model to provide an interpretation of the historic seafloor elevation. These data were produced to provide an estimate of historical bathymetry for the Mississippi-Alabama coastal region to aid geologic and coastal hazards studies. This data release includes georeferenced H-sheets, depth soundings, and a bathymetric grid derived from the 1847 and 1895 soundings for the Mississippi (MS) and Alabama (AL) coastal region and a sub-region of Grand Bay, MS. The original NOS H-sheets and nautical charts were scanned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and are available through the National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) website (https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/bathymetry/hydro.html or https://historicalcharts.noaa.gov/) as non-georeferenced digital raster files. U.S. Geological Survey St. Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Center (USGS SPCMSC) staff performed the following procedures: H-sheets were georeferenced, georeferenced raster images were projected to a modern datum, and historical bathymetric sounding measurements were digitized to create a vector point shapefile. Sounding data were converted from feet (ft) and fathoms (fm) to meters (m), projected to modern mean low water (MLW), and converted to the North American Vertical Datum of 1988 (NAVD88) GEOID12A using NOAA's datum transformation software, VDatum. Please read the full metadata for details on data collection, digitized data, dataset variables, and data quality.
Note: This data release contains data previously published (https://doi.org/10.5066/P92JEA6U) on July 31, 2020. This data release was updated on March 15, 2022 with additional data covering Pascagoula, Mississippi to Mobile Bay, Alabama. Please see the Suggested Citation section for details.
Data
| File Name and Description | Metadata (XML format) | Metadata (text format) | Download File |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bathymetric_Soundings.zip Point shapefile and comma separated value file of digitized soundings derived from H-sheets (.shp, .csv) |
Bathymetric_ Soundings_Metadata.xml |
Bathymetric_ Soundings_Metadata.txt |
Bathymetric_Soundings.zip (3 MB) |
| Gridded_Bathymetry.zip Gridded bathymetric data derived from depth contours and soundings for Grand Bay and MS/AL (.tif) |
Gridded_ Bathymetry_Metadata.xml |
Gridded_ Bathymetry_Metadata.txt |
Gridded_Bathymetry.zip (59 MB) |
| Hydrographic_Sheets.zip Georeferenced H-sheet and nautical chart rasters (.tif) H-sheet rasters (.tif) |
Hydrographic_ Sheet_Metadata.xml |
Hydrographic_ Sheet_Metadata.txt |
Hydrographic_Sheets.zip (5.63 GB) |
Figure 1. Map of the Mississippi and Alabama study area.
Suggested Citation
Terrano, J.F., Smith, K.E.L., Muni-Morgan, A.L., Buster, N.A., and Foxen, F., 2021, Historical bathymetry in the Mississippi-Alabama coastal region: Bathymetric soundings, gridded digital elevation model, and hydrographic sheets (ver. 2.0, March 2022): U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9GRUK4B.
First published July 31, 2020 as https://doi.org/10.5066/P92JEA6U.
Revised January 22, 2021
Revised and added additional data March 15, 2022, ver. 2.0