We present a high-resolution shoreline data set amalgamated from two data bases in the public domain. The data have undergone extensive processing and are free of internal inconsistencies such as erratic points and crossing segments. The shorelines are constructed entirely from hierarchically arranged closed polygons. The data can be used to simplify data searches and data selections, or to study the statistical characteristics of shorelines and land-masses. The data set can be accessed both electronically from this page and from the National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC), Boulder, Colorado; it comes with access software and routines to facilitate decimation based on a standard line-reduction algorithm. The shoreline data can also be imported to a GRASS GIS database with v.in.gshhs, a GRASS add-on by Markus Metz. As is, the tbz or zip files also contains the river and political borders present in the WDBII data base. Unlike the GSHHS polygons at all resolutions, the lower resolution rivers are not guaranteed not to cross.
GSHHS is developed and maintained by
Paul Wessel, SOEST, University of Hawai'i, Honolulu, HI.
Walter H. F. Smith, NOAA Geosciences Lab, National Ocean Service, Silver Spring, MD.
Wessel, P., and W. H. F. Smith, A Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-resolution Shoreline Database, J. Geophys. Res., 101, 8741-8743, 1996.