The GEBCO_2020 Grid was released in May 2020 and is the second global bathymetric product released by the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO) and has been developed through the Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project.

The GEBCO_2020 Grid provides global coverage of elevation data in meters on a 15 arc-second grid of 43200 rows x 86400 columns, giving 3,732,480,000 data points.

Grid Development

The GEBCO_2020 Grid is a continuous, global terrain model for ocean and land with a spatial resolution of 15 arc seconds.

The grid uses as a ‘base’ Version 2 of the SRTM15+ data set (Tozer et al, 2019). This data set is a fusion of land topography with measured and estimated seafloor topography. It is augmented with the gridded bathymetric data sets developed by the four Seabed 2030 Regional Centers.

The Regional Centers have compiled gridded bathymetric data sets, largely based on multibeam data, for their areas of responsibility. These regional grids were then provided to the Global Center.

For areas outside of the polar regions (primarily south of 60°N and north of 50°S), these data sets are in the form of 'sparse grids', i.e. only grid cells that contain data were populated. For the polar regions, complete grids were provided due to the complexities of incorporating data held in polar coordinates.

The compilation of the GEBCO_2020 Grid from these regional data grids was carried out at the Global Center, with the aim of producing a seamless global terrain model.

In contrast to the development of the previous GEBCO grid, GEBCO_2019, the data sets provided as sparse grids by the Regional Centers were included on to the base grid without any blending, i.e. grid cells in the base grid were replaced with data from the sparse grids. This was with aim of avoiding creating edge effects, 'ridges and ripples', at the boundaries between the sparse grids and base grid during the blending process used previously. In addition, this allows a clear identification of the data source within the grid, with no cells being 'blended' values. Routines from Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) system were used to do the merging of the data sets.

For the polar data sets, and the adjoining North Sea area, supplied in the form of complete grids these data sets were included using feather blending techniques from GlobalMapper software version 11.0, made available by Blue Marble Geographic.

The GEBCO_2020 Grid includes data sets from a number of international and national data repositories and regional mapping initiatives. For information on the data sets included in the GEBCO_2020 Grid, please see the list of contributions included in this release of the grid (https://www.gebco.net/data_and_products/gridded_bathymetry_data/gebco_2020/#compilations).