The bathymetry of the Adriatic Sea

The Istituto di Scienze Marine (ISMAR-CNR) conducted several research projects in the Italian side of the Adriatic Sea over more than 15 years collecting bathymetric, geophysical, and sediment core data and performing multidisciplinary studies to reconstruct paleoenvironmental changes and sediment dynamics during the last eustatic cycle. A key issue in any marine dataset is the construction of a detailed bathymetry. The Adriatic Sea bathymetry is unique because, due to the shallow water depth of large areas of the basin, standard hydrographic surveys to obtain a comprehensive Multi Beam bathymetry are not applicable. The Adriatic Sea bathymetric map is necessarily based on heterogeneous data with uneven spatial distribution and includes both Single Beam echo-soundings and Multi Beam surveys in key study areas. The main objectives of this work are to illustrate the methodology applied to compile a new bathymetric map of the Adriatic Sea integrating Single Beam and Multi Beam data, to describe the morphological units reflecting the main geological features, and to discuss the limits of reliability of the data when a bathymetric map is to used by oceanographic modellers