Gridded bathymetry from EM120 multibeam echosounder of R/V METEOR cruise M67/2 (Gulf of Mexico, Campeche Bay)

Between 14.03.2006 and 25.04.2006, bathymetric data based on the KONGSBERG EM120 system (MBES) was acquired in the Gulf of Mexico during the R/V METEOR cruise M67/2. The main research goal was the investigation of asphalt volcanoes in the Campeche Bay and related sedimentary structures. The leg was split into two parts. During the first sub-leg 2a geophysical and especially hydroacoustic methods were used to explore the distribution of these asphalt volcanoes and to map knolls as well as other structures like mass wasting and asphalt flows. Using reflection seismic, sedimentary structures related to the volcanoes were also investigated. Further mapping but also sampling of vent fluids and asphalt was the research interest of sub-leg 2b. Therefore the Remotely Operating Vehicle (ROV) QUEST (Marum) as well as a TV-MUC were used. Bathymetry mapping was done using the EM120 for deeper and the EM710 for shallower regions. CI Citation: Paul Wintersteller (seafloor-imaging@marum.de) as responsible party for bathymetry raw data ingest and approval. Description of the data source: During the M67/2 cruise, the hull-mounted multibeam echosounder (MBES) KONGSBERG EM120 was utilized to perform bathymetric mapping. It allows to conduct surveys in water depths of up to 11,000 m. Two transducer arrays transmit frequency coded acoustic signals (11.25 to 12.6 kHz). While the emission beam has a dimension of 150° across and 2° along track, the reception is obtained from 191 overlapping beams with widths of 2° across and 20° along track. The beam footprint has a dimension of 2° by 2°. For further information on the system, consult: https://www.km.kongsberg.com/ Due to the water depth of the research area the EM120 was permanently used. Only for shallower regions the EM710 was used too. To convert the recorded travel times into water depth, several sound velocity profiles were obtained with the shipboard CTD, providing a correction for ray bending for each beam. Depth is estimated from each beam by using the two-way travel time and the known beam angle known, and taking into account the ray bending due to refraction in the water column by sound speed variations. Responsible person during this cruise / PI: Volkhard Spieß (vspiess uni-bremen.de), Gerhard Bohrmann (gbohrmann@marum.de) Description of data processing: Postprocessing and products were conducted by the Seafloor-Imaging & Mapping group of MARUM/FB5, responsible person: Paul Wintersteller (seafloor-imaging@marum.de). The open source software MB-System suite (Caress, D.W., and D.N. Chayes, MB-System Version 5.6, open source software distributed from the MBARI and L-DEO web sites, 2000-2012.) was utilized for this purpose. The data was corrected for the roll movement of the vessel using a roll bias of - 0.1. A tide correction was applied, based on the Oregon State University (OSU) tidal prediction software (OTPS) that is retrievable through MB-System. In addition svp corrections were done. Using Mbeditviz, artefacts were cleaned manually. NetCDF (GMT) grids of the edited data as well as statistics were created with mbgrid. The published bathymetric grid of the EM120 during cruise M67-2 has a resolution of 25 m. No total propagated uncertainty (TPU) has been calculated to gather vertical or horizontal accuracy. A higher resolution is, at least partly, achievable. The grid extended with _num represents a raster dataset with the statistical number of beams/depths taken into account to create the depth of the cell. The extended _sd -grid contains the standard deviation for each cell. All grids produced are retrievable through the PANGAEA database (www.pangaea.de). Chief Scientist: : Volkhard Spieß (vspiess uni-bremen.de), Gerhard Bohrmann (gbohrmann@marum.de) CR: https://www.tib.eu/de/suchen/id/awi%3Adoi~10.2312%252Fcr_m67/ CSR: https://www2.bsh.de/aktdat/dod/fahrtergebnis/2006/20060077.ht