A suite of processing software (called SwathEd) (www.omg.unb.ca/~jhc/SwathEd.html), developed by the Ocean Mapping Group at the University of New Brunswick, Canada,
was used to process and grid the multibeam bathymetric soundings and produce shaded-relief images. The metadata for the grids describes the processing steps applied to the navigation and bathymetric soundings. The following processing steps produced the image of shaded-relief bathymetry:
1. Create a 6-m grid of the bathymetric soundings for Massachusetts Bay using the SwathEd routine weighgrid.
Command line: weigh_grid -fresh_start -omg -tide -coeffs -mindep -2 -maxdep -800 -beam_mask -beam_weight -custom_weight EM1000_Weights -butter -power 2 -cutoff 12 -lambda 3 gridFile filename.merged
2. Create a shaded relief image of the bathymetry using SwathEd routine addSUN (sun elevation of 45 degrees from 350, vertically exaggerating 4 times).
Command line: addSUN -elev 45 -azi350 -vert_exag 4.0 gridFile.r4 filename.shade
3. Use a two-point linear contrast stretch to enhance the shaded relief image:
Command line: stretchacres -low 150 -high 200 -in filename.shade -out filename_shade.stretch
4. Convert the contrast-stretched shaded relief image from SwathEd format to a tiff file using the netpbm utilities (
http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/):
Command line: rawtopgm -headerskip 1024 image_width image_height filename_shade.stretch | pnmtotiff -none - > filename.tif
5. Create an ESRI world file (tfw) for the shaded relief tiff image for import to ArcView or ArcGIS. Copy bounding box and resolution information from the jview program output to the tfw file.
Command line: jview filename_shade.stretch