CRC-SI Project 114: Reconciling Bathymetric Height Datums for Australia

A research report from Geoscience Australia, last updated March 2026, focuses on reconciling vertical height datums for bathymetric data in Australia. The work addresses disparities between terrestrial datums like the Australian Height Datum and marine datums like Chart Datum or Lowest Astronomical Tide. It presents a methodology for calculating uncertainties for Mean Sea Level observations to aid in creating a unified ellipsoidal surface.

Use Cases

• Modeling coastal inundation and sea-level rise based on reconciled height datums mentioned in the description
• Improving nautical chart accuracy for under-keel clearance calculations based on tidal datum reconciliation
• Creating seamless digital elevation models spanning land and sea based on the ellipsoidal MSL surface methodology
• Assessing uncertainty in coastal infrastructure planning based on the presented uncertainty calculations for tidal planes

Strengths

• Report is sourced from Geoscience Australia, a national authoritative body for geospatial data
• Focuses on a specific, documented problem of datum disparity in Australian coastal data
• Last updated date is explicitly provided (2026-03 25)

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download
• The report notes that methodologies for computing uncertainties of LAT and HAT tidal planes were not developed

Provenance

Source

Geoscience Australia Data

Collection Method

Research project (CRC-SI Project 114) report

Time Range

Project report date is unspecified; last metadata update is 2026.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-25 17:13:08.403838; freshness should be verified

Geography

Australia