An Integrated Marine Data Collection for the German Bight – Part I: Subaqueous Geomorphology and Surface Sedimentology

Abstract

Abstract. The German Bight located within the central North Sea is a hydro- and morphodynamically highly complex system of estuaries, barrier islands and part of the world’s largest coherent tidal flats, the Wadden Sea. To identify and understand challenges faced by coastal stakeholders, such as harbor operators or governmental agencies, to maintain waterways and employ numerical models for further analyses, it is imperative to have a consistent data base for both bathymetry and surface sedimentology. Current commercial and public data products are insufficient in spatial and temporal 15 resolution and coverage for recent analyses methods. Thus, this first part of a two-part publication series of the German joint project EasyGSH-DB describes annual bathymetric digital terrain models in a 10 m gridded resolution for the German North Sea coast and German Bight from 1996 to 2016 (Sievers et al., 2020a, https://doi.org/10.48437/02.2020.K2.7000.0001 ), as well as surface sedimentological models of discretized cumulative grain size distribution functions for 1996, 2006 and 2016 on 100 m grids (Sievers et al., 2020b, https://doi.org/10.48437/02.2020.K2.7000.0005 ). Furthermore, basic morphodynamic and sedimentological 20 processing analyses, such as the estimation of e.g. bathymetric stability or surface maps of sedimentological parameters, are provided (Sievers et al., 2020a, 2020b, see respective download links).