Australian Continental Shelf Bed Shear Stress Exposure, 1997-2005

The Australian Ocean Data Network provides a dataset quantifying seabed exposure to oceanographic processes on the Australian continental shelf. It contains modeled combined flow bed shear stress data for an 8-year period from March 1997 to February 2005. The data is used to classify exposure levels via three regionalization methods relating stress to sediment properties and water depth.

Use Cases

• Regionalizing seabed exposure to oceanographic processes based on modeled bed shear stress.
• Analyzing relationships between oceanographic exposure and physical sediment properties like grain size.
• Distinguishing benthic environments dominated by high-frequency versus low-frequency stress events.
• Quantifying exposure for habitat classification in marine planning and policy procedures.

Strengths

• Covers the entire Australian continental shelf.
• Provides an 8-year temporal coverage from March 1997 to February 2005.
• Applies three distinct methods for classifying oceanographic exposure levels.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect temporal bias inherent to the 1997-2005 modeling period.

Provenance

Source

Australian Ocean Data Network

Collection Method

Output from a suite of numerical models predicting oceanic processes.

Time Range

March 1997 - February 2005

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-10 19:17:38.629206; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Australian continental shelf