Initiated in 1997, this undertaking has so far engaged the volunteer efforts of investigators who are affiliated with 24 institutions in 10 countries: Canada, Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and the USA. The activity has also been endorsed by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC), the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO), the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO), and the US National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) (now the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI)).
Version 3.0 (June 8, 2012)
IBCAO Grid is now available for downloading along with geo-referenced images and maps that are suitable for plotting.
IBCAO Version 3.0 represents the largest improvement since 1999 taking advantage of new data sets collected by the circum-Arctic nations, opportunistic data collected from fishing vessels, data acquired from US Navy submarines and from research ships of various nations. Built using an improved gridding algorithm, this new grid is on a 500 meter spacing, revealing much greater details of the Arctic seafloor than IBCAO Version 1.0 (2.5 km) and Version 2.0 (2.0 km). The area covered by multibeam surveys has increased from ~6 % in Version 2.0 to ~11% in Version 3.0. The compilation of IBCAO Version 3.0 is described in a Geophysical Research Letter article available for download.
Please acknowledge the following citation when using the IBCAO grids and maps:
Jakobsson, M., L. A. Mayer, B. Coakley, J. A. Dowdeswell, S. Forbes, B. Fridman, H. Hodnesdal, R. Noormets, R. Pedersen, M. Rebesco, H.-W. Schenke, Y. Zarayskaya A, D. Accettella, A. Armstrong, R. M. Anderson, P. Bienhoff, A. Camerlenghi, I. Church, M. Edwards, J. V. Gardner, J. K. Hall, B. Hell, O. B. Hestvik, Y. Kristoffersen, C. Marcussen, R. Mohammad, D. Mosher, S. V. Nghiem, M. T. Pedrosa, P. G. Travaglini, and P. Weatherall, The International Bathymetric Chart of the Arctic Ocean (IBCAO) Version 3.0, Geophysical Research Letters, doi: 10.1029/2012GL052219.
[Auxiliary Material]
URL: http://www.ibcao.org
maintained by: NOAA/NCEI & World Data Service for Geophysics