General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO)

Gridded bathymetric data sets

Bathymetry data from the GEBCO_08 Grid ©

GEBCO's aim is to provide the most authoritative, publicly-available bathymetry for the world's oceans. It operates under the joint auspices of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) and the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO).

Two GEBCO gridded bathymetric data sets, maintained and distributed by BODC, are available to download as netCDF files. You may opt to download data for a user-defined area or the complete global file(s).

• The GEBCO One Minute Grid — a global one arc-minute grid
  Released: 2003, updated: 2008 — largely based on the most recent set of bathymetric contours contained within the GEBCO Digital Atlas.
• The GEBCO_08 Grid — a global 30 arc-second grid

  Released: September 2010 — generated by combining quality-controlled ship depth soundings with interpolation between sounding points guided by satellite derived gravity data. A ‘source identifier’, SID, grid is also available to download to accompany the GEBCO_08 Grid. This shows which grid cells have been constrained by bathymetry data during the gridding process.

  The GEBCO_08 Grid is currently a development product which will undergo periodic update. Although every effort has been made to reduce the number of errors in the data set, we expect that some grid artifacts will be found. A list of reported bugs may be found on the errata pages.

Additional information

Data set documentation along with information on export formats, grid version numbering and bug alerts for each of GEBCO's gridded data sets is also available

• GEBCO_08 grid — 30 arc-second resolution
• GEBCO one minute grid — one arc-minute resolution

Free software is available for viewing and accessing data from the grids in ASCII as well as netCDF. Find out more about the GEBCO Grid display software