A bit of aside, but this is a wonderful example of how data-rich our community has become in recent years. I was asked to quickly produce a suite of maps depicting shallow ocean nutrient contents along a hypothetical route through the Indian Ocean (by a friend, who is currently en route... obviously with a much more detailed set of navigational maps...). From a few sources—namely ESRI for base maps and administrative data, NOAA's National Oceanographic Data Center for the ocean content data, and Natural Earth for bathymetry contours—we were able to produce a few highly colorful, if not slightly visually cluttered, oceanographic maps for their expedition in a couple of hours. The best part? All of these datasets were free! I LOVE free data....ok, not all data, but FREE data from reputable sources! It's a GIS wonderland out there folks -- go get some data!
Here's a quick figure depicting nitrogen content at 75m depth, with bathymetric contours in pink. I meant to label the contours, but ran out of time. IndigoV expedition runs from Cape Town, South Africa to Port Louis, Mauritius. Visit their website at
http://indigov.unsw.edu.au/ for more maps and updates on the expedition.
[world Robinson projection]
For data sources, please visit:
http://www.naturalearthdata.com/
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/WOD09/pr_wod09.html
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