Australian Continental Shelf Seabed Exposure to Oceanographic Processes, 1997-2005

An 8-year model of combined flow bed shear stress quantifies seabed exposure across the entire Australian continental shelf. Output from numerical models predicting waves, tides, winds, and currents was used to compute stresses from March 1997 to February 2005. The Australian Ocean Data Network provides three regionalisation methods to classify exposure magnitude and frequency.

Use Cases

• Classifying seabed exposure regions based on the spectral regionalisation method described.
• Analyzing the relationship between oceanographic stress and physical sediment properties like grain size and carbonate content.
• Assessing the balance between the work done on the seabed and the frequency of stress events as per the third method.
• Distinguishing between high-frequency (diurnal/semi-diurnal) and low-frequency (synoptic/annual) disturbance regimes for habitat mapping.

Strengths

• Covers the entire Australian continental shelf spatially.
• Provides an 8-year temporal series from March 1997 to February 2005.
• Compares three distinct regionalisation methods for classifying exposure.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Freshness should be verified as the last update date is in the future (2026-06-23).

Provenance

Source

Australian Ocean Data Network

Collection Method

Output from a suite of numerical models predicting oceanic processes.

Time Range

March 1997 to February 2005

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-23 04:00:29.524957; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Australian continental shelf