The survey data was acquired by Geoscience Australia using the Australian Antarctic Division workboat Howard Burton and the Navy using Royal Australian Navy Antarctic Survey Vessel Wyatt Earp from 10 January to 17 February 2017 as a component of Australian Antarctic Program (AAP) Project 5093 Hydrographic Surveying and Seafloor Characterisation Program (Chief Investigator: Ursula Harris, AAD).

The Chief Scientist onboard the Howard Burton was Dr. Jodie Smith (Geoscience Australia) and the Officer in Charge of Survey onboard the Wyatt Earp was LCDR MI Kumpis (Deployable Geospatial Support Team, DGST).

Initial processing of the datasets was conducted during the survey by Kim Picard (Geoscience Australia), POHSM PJ Coates and LCDR MI Kumpis (DGST).

IX Survey conducted further processing of the Geoscience Australia dataset and this dataset provided to the Australian Hydrographic Office who processed the combined Geoscience Australia and Navy datasets for charting purposes. All details are in the Report of Survey HI590 (AHS Reference: HYDRO 123/16).

The high-resolution bathymetry grid (2 m resolution) was produced following final processing by Michele Spinoccia (Geoscience Australia), using CARIS HIPS & SIPS ver 7.1.2 and 9.1.12.

1. First a vessel configuration file was created where the co-ordinates of the motion sensor and DGPS antenna and patch test offsets were recorded.

2. A new project was then created and the vessel configuration file was attached to the project file.

3. The raw swath sonar data, for each line was then imported into the project and the vessel information assigned to the data.

4. The motion sensor, DGPS and heading data were then cleaned using a filter that averaged adjacent data to remove artefacts.

5. Different sound velocity profiles data for each block were attached to the corresponding raw swath sonar data files to correct the depths for changes in the speed of sound through the water column.

6. Then a new blank field area was defined that specified the geographic area of study and the co-ordinate system used. The co-ordinates for the study areas were WGS84 UTM-43S.

7. The data was cleaned by applying several filters that removed any remaining spikes in the bathymetry data using user defined threshold values. A visual inspection of the data for each line was then undertaken where artefacts and noisy data not removed by the filtering process were removed manually using Swath and subset editors modules of the Caris HIPS/SIPS software.

8. All the data for each bathymetric, motion sensor, DGPS, heading, tide and sound velocity profile data were merged to produce the final processed data file. A weighted grid of the processed data was then created for each Block. In GA the tide was applied to the grid to correct for tidal variations and velocity corrections were performed to correct for different artefacts and mismatches.

9. The processed data was finally exported as grids soundings or false coloured images for presentation and reporting and as final processed data in ASCII XYZ as well as geotif formats at the optimum resolution the data can provide.

10.Using CARIS HIPS & SIPS 9.1.12 the grid was exported as ESRI ASCII grid, then imported into ARC catalogue/info to create a raster file for the entire survey in a 2m resolution grid.