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Articles

1964: Vol. XLI, No. 2

Determination of Average Ocean Depths from Bathymetric Data

Submitted
August 11, 2015
Published
2015-07-30

Abstract

The problem of determining average ocean depths for a region of the world-ocean, or for all oceans together, is encountered in theoretical oceanography (such as determining the ocean tides theoretically on the basis of Laplace's tidal equations), where numerical computations have to be carried out. In these cases it is usually required to represent the actual variable depths by average values taken over some regular grid. It is the purpose of this paper to describe a method of computing such average depths from bathymetric soundings made at irregularly spaced stations in the ocean. The method is applied in order to determine average depths for the world oceans in a grid of one degree.