Implementation of a GIS Dedicated to Marine Geology

Alexandra Helena Morgado,

Hidrographic institute of the Portuguese Navy - Marine Geology Division (PT)

The Marine Geology Division (MGD) of the Hydrographic Institute of the Portuguese Navy (IHPT), as more than 40 years of data collected during multidisciplinary surveys and field works. This gives IHPT a long background of marine geosciences. However, geologic data collected during that period of time as not been yet organized on a database, and most of it still remains in analogical format.
With the new developments perceived on data acquisition techniques, more accurate and precise data information is available for scientist, with typical size of files increasing in a exponential relation. Also the need for data exchange between different research areas becomes an ordinary task. This means that the difficulties that always existed on organizing data for storing and future sharing started to be unbearable. To solve that, in the last three years the IHPT has made a considerable effort, financial and scientific, on the acquisition and development of a Geographic Information System (GIS). It is expected that the new GIS system (implemented to the geologic data) will answer the needs of an organization with so many areas of interest and responsibilities on the ocean, river and estuary dynamic processes and cartography.
The modelling, construction and feeding of an oracle database and the planning and building of a GIS specially address for MGD, has started only in December of 2002.
The development of new technologies and information systems associated with cartography, mainly the evolution of GIS functionalities on that area of study, lead the Marine Geology Division, to evaluate and determine the eventual GIS benefits associated with the elaboration of digital sedimentary charts on the Portuguese Continental Shelf (Figure 1).
Other aspect evaluated over GIS functionalities was its usefulness in the planning of multidisciplinary surveys regarding the sediment dynamics on the littoral (Figure 2).
In this paper some of the preliminary outputs, will be presented.

Figure 1 - Digital sediment chart of the continental shelf between the estuaries of the Tagus river and Sado river.

Figure 2: Study areas of the project "Influence of the Sines Cape on the littoral sediment transport"