Development of a user friendly marine geographic information system with spatial data analysis and error estimation of three dimensional data model in the Hawaiian Exclusive Economic Zone

This paper describes the development of a user-friendly marine geographic information system (MGIS) which performs tasks such as processing, storing, updating, manipulating and analyzing different spatial marine data. For the development of the author´s MGIS, various hardware systems including PC, workstation, plotter, scanner and printer, as well as software such as GIV, ARC/INFO ver 7, and its various modules, image processing software tools such as Imagetool, XV and Corel Draw were used. The users can access the database with the aid of menus developed for querying the database. The data used for this project were retrieved from the GEODAS CD-ROM published by National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC), USA. The database include bathymetric, gravity and magnetic data collected in the part of the Hawaiian Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) by numerous national and international organizations over the past several decades. The data points have both spatial and non-spatial attributes. This project involved the extensive use of various modules of ARC/INFO: ARCEDIT, ARCPLOT, TIN, AML and INFO. The menus were developed using AML. The entire sequence of stages which involves invoking various modules is controlled by a main menu which in turn generates lower level pop-up submenus. TIN was used to create three dimensional ocean bottom surface and also for surface analysis to derive information about ocean bottom that cannot be determined with two dimensional analysis tools alone. Marine data which have been collected over the years have varied spatial resolution and accuracy. To create a more accurate three dimensional surface model with these data needs extensive spatial statistical analysis which includes giving different weightage to data points collected by different instruments and have different positional errors. This marine GIS model performs the error analysis of the three dimensional surfaces created using different data points