Bathymetric Survey of the West Florida Shelf, Gulf of Mexico 2001 (NCEI Accession 0001410)

A zone of deep-water reefs is thought to extend from the mid and outer shelf south of Mississippi and Alabama to at least the northwestern Florida shelf off Panama City, Florida. Reefs off Mississippi and Alabama are found in water depths of 60 to 120 m (Ludwick and Walton, 1957, Gardner et al., in press) and were the focus of a multibeam echosounder mapping survey by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in 2000 (Gardner et al., 2000, in press). It is critical to determine the accurate geomorphology and type of the reefs that occur because of their importance as benthic habitats for fisheries. These data are ArcInfo GRID and XYZ ASCII format data generated from a U.S. Geological Survey multibeam sonar survey of the West Florida Shelf, Gulf of Mexico. The data include high-resolution bathymetry and calibrated acoustic backscatter. File types include arc files .dat, .nit, and .adf. Documentation is included as metadata .txt files. Because the area is so large (i.e., the file sizes are very large), the area was subdivided into North, Central, and South regions as reflected in the data subdirectories for this accession.