Gridded data of the topography and bathymetry of the Earth’s surface has become widely available online thanks to the efforts of multiple research groups. This data is of continually growing importance both for monitoring operations and for scientific research because it is critical in presenting clear, final results to end users.
This data set is large and requires special tools to manipulate. It is compressed using bzip2. Unix and Linux users should go to the bzip2 project page for information. A suggested Windows bzip2 utility is IZArc.
Once uncompressed, the data is in Generic Mapping Tool (GMT) format. This free, open source tool is available from the GMT download page.
Citation: Lindquist, K. G., K. Engle, D. Stahlke, and E. Price (2004), Global Topography and Bathymetry Grid Improves Research Efforts, Eos Trans. AGU, 85(19), 186.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2004/2004EO190003.shtml
PDF file
