Australian Continental Shelf Bed Shear Stress Exposure, 1997-2005

An 8-year period (March 1997 to February 2005) of modeled combined flow bed shear stress data for the entire Australian continental shelf. Geoscience Australia produced this dataset to quantify seabed exposure to ocean waves, tides, and currents using three classification methods. The outputs are intended for marine habitat classification, planning, and policy.

Use Cases

• Regionalizing seabed exposure based on the spectral characteristics of stress events.
• Classifying oceanographic exposure levels based on the shape of the probability distribution function of stress.
• Assessing the balance between the work done on the seabed and the frequency of stress events.
• Correlating exposure regions with physical sediment properties like mean grain size and carbonate content.
• Distinguishing between high-frequency (diurnal/semi-diurnal) and low-frequency (synoptic/annual) exposure events.

Strengths

• Covers the entire Australian continental shelf.
• Based on an 8-year time series from March 1997 to February 2005.
• Applies three distinct methodological approaches for regionalization.

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 geographic bias inherent to data_gov_au.

Provenance

Source

Geoscience Australia Data

Collection Method

Output from a suite of numerical models predicting oceanic processes.

Time Range

March 1997 - February 2005

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03 25 18:15:03.607761; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Australian continental shelf