Use of the dataset Quality Index to expand services associated to the EMODnet DTM. Version 12-01-2023.

Abstract

EMODnet bathymetry is composed of a large number of datasets from many data providers. Users of the resulting grid and associated datasets need to be able to evaluate the quality of the bathymetric product and associated data they will be using, at the grid node level. For that purpose, it was requested from the data provider to provide a quality assessment of the data they are providing. Tools were developed to help them generating this information as part of the metadata. Using this qualitative information helped the basin coordinators to set the level of priority of a data source over another one in case of overlap. Likewise, this information is being used to generate cartographic layouts enabling the users to assess the confidence he/she can get locally from the bathymetric DEM product. This document first introduces the methodology used to define four quality indexes (known as QI, in the following sections of this document) for each datasets. Then, in a second part, it describes how the information gathered from each data provider for each dataset is used both in the context of the generation of the bathymetric DEM product and in its qualitative assessment (at the level of the grid cell).