Multibeam Mapping of the South Atlantic Bight: Georgia 2005, a Proposed MPA on the Continental Shelf

The NOAA Fisheries laboratory in Panama City, Florida coordinated an acoustic survey at the new proposed Marine Protected Areas in the South Atlantic Bight area June 20- July 7th, 2005. This metadata record is the parent record for the multi-beam echosounder (MBES) survey at the Georgia proposed MPA, which includes the following products: 1) XYZ ascii table created from the grid, 2) colored coded shaded geotiffs from the grid, 3) backscatter mosaic, 4) XYA (amplitude) ascii table created from the mosaic, and 5) geotif of backscatter draped on the bathymetric grid. All products are available contacting the distributor. Some data sets are also posted on NOAA's Coral Reef Information System (CoRIS) at www.coris.noaa.gov. Another product that will not be distributed, but will be used as input to habitat classification software (QTC MultiView (website)), are raw data files logged to disk using the Simrad EM3002 MBES data acquisition software. These raw files contain packets of information (depth soundings, navigation, attitude, sound velocity profiles, UTC time) that the acquisition software logged sequentially in time. The raw data format is available from Kongsberg-Simrad (website). The MBES system was provided by Seafloor Systems Inc. and the support vessel was UNCW's 70-ft. R/V Cape Fear. This survey is part of an on-going partnership effort funded by the NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program (CRCP). This survey was funded by a CRCP grant to Andrew David, NOAA Fisheries - Panama City, and Andrew Shepard, NURC/UNCW (The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's Undersea Research Center at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington). In addition to partners above, other partners include UNCW's Spatial Analysis Lab, US Geological Survey, and the S. Atlantic fishery Management Council.