Multibeam Mapping Survey Oculina Banks 2005

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Undersea Research Center at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington (NURC/UNCW) coordinated an acoustic survey in portions of the Oculina Habitat Area of Particular Concern from June 14-19, 2005. This metadata record is the parent record for this multi-beam echosounder (MBES) survey, which includes the following products: 1) bathymetric grid, 2) XYZ ascii table created from the grid, 3) colored coded shaded geotiffs from the grid, 4) backscatter mosaic, 5) XYA (amplitude) ascii table created from the mosaic, and 6) geotif of backscatter draped on the bathymetric grid. All products are available through an on-line Oculina Geographic Information system (www.uncw.edu/oculina) and on an OGIS CD. Some data sets are also posted on NOAA's Coral Reef Information System (CoRIS) at www.coris.noaa.gov. Another product that will not be distributed, but will be used as input to habitat classification software (QTC MultiView (website)), are raw data files logged to disk using the the Simrad EM3002 MBES data acquisition software. These raw files contain packets of information (depth soundings, navigation, attitude, sound velocity profiles, UTC time) that the acquisition software logged sequentially in time. The raw data format is available from Kongsberg-Simrad (website). The MBES system was provided by Seafloor Systems Inc. and the support vessel was UNCW's 70-ft. R/V Cape Fear. This survey is part of an on-going partnership effort funded by the NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program (CRCP). This survey was funded by a CRCP grant to Andrew David, NOAA Fisheries - Panama City, and Andrew Shepard, NURC/UNCW. In addition to partners above, other partners include UNCW's Spatial Analysis Lab, US Geological Survey, and the S. Atlantic fishery Management Council.

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  "http://www.uncw.edu/oculina"
]