Welcome to the Hydrography portal 

The European Commission, represented for the purposes of this project by the Directorate-General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries (DG MARE), has concluded service contracts for creating pilot components of the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet). The overall objective is to create pilots to migrate fragmented and inaccessible marine data into interoperable, continuous and publicly available data streams for complete maritime basins. The results will help to define processes, best technology and approximate costs of a final operational European Marine Observation and Data Network.

This EMODnet-Hydrography portal is one of the portals, that is being developed as part of the EMODnet preparatory actions for the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet).

The portal provides hydrographic data collated for a number of sea regions in Europe:

  • the Greater North Sea, including the Kattegat and stretches of water such as Fair Isle, Cromarty, Forth, Forties,Dover, Wight, and Portland
  • the English Channel and Celtic Seas
  • Western Mediterranean, the Ionian Sea and the Central Mediterranean Sea
  • Iberian Coast and Bay of Biscay (Atlantic Ocean)
  • Adriatic Sea (Mediterranean)
  • Aegean - Levantine Sea (Mediterranean).

Users have access to the following geographical information system layers:

  • water depth in gridded form over whole of maritime basin on a grid of at least quarter a minute of longitude and latitude
  • water depth in vector form with isobaths at a scale of at least one to one million
  • depth profiles along tracklines
  • coastlines
  • underwater features - wrecks, seabed obstructions etc

The portal is being developed with the main purpose to allow the download of data products for further analysis by users and to make it available for combination with data products from other portals including the other portals developed as part of the EMODnet preparatory actions for marine biology, marine chemistry, marine geology and marine habitats. The portal also provides a data discovery and access service to identify and request access to hydrographic survey data that are managed by a range of organisations and that are at the basis of the digital bathymetry products.   

The portal development started in June 2009. Operational services and hydrographic data products for all maritime basins (see above) are available to users since June 2011.