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. Also included is a utility for importing the shoreline data to a GRASS GIS database.
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.
The GSHHS data and software are available via anonymous ftp.
The latest data files for version 1.10 were created March 14, 2008. Note that the gshhs software (version 1.10) is also a GMT supplement (GMT version 4.3.0).
Return to SOEST home page.
This page is maintained by:
Paul Wessel (pwessel@hawaii.edu) Last update April 22, 2008