Abstract. Seabed sediment mapping is important for a wide range of marine policy,
planning and scientific issues, and there has been considerable national and
international investment around the world in the collation and synthesis of
sediment datasets. However, in Europe at least, much of this effort has been
directed towards seabed classification and mapping of discrete habitats.
Scientific users often have to resort to reverse engineering these
classifications to recover continuous variables, such as mud content and
median grain size, that are required for many ecological and biophysical
studies. Here we present a new set of 0.125∘ by 0.125∘ resolution
synthetic maps of continuous properties of the north-west European sedimentary
environment, extending from the Bay of Biscay to the northern limits of the
North Sea and the Faroe Islands. The maps are a blend of gridded survey data,
statistically modelled values based on distributions of bed shear stress
due to tidal currents and waves, and bathymetric properties. Recent work has
shown that statistical models can predict sediment composition in British
waters and the North Sea with high accuracy, and here we extend this to the
entire shelf and to the mapping of other key seabed parameters. The maps
include percentage compositions of mud, sand and gravel; porosity and
permeability; median grain size of the whole sediment and of the sand and the
gravel fractions; carbon and nitrogen content of sediments; percentage of
seabed area covered by rock; mean and maximum depth-averaged tidal velocity
and wave orbital velocity at the seabed; and mean monthly natural disturbance
rates. A number of applications for these maps exist, including species
distribution modelling and the more accurate representation of sea-floor
biogeochemistry in ecosystem models. The data products are available from
https://doi.org/10.15129/1e27b806-1eae-494d-83b5-a5f4792c46fc.
NUMERICAL STORM SURGE FORECASTING
