Coastal & marine
Depths, tides and shorelines: bathymetry grids, which line is the coast, inundation, vessel tracks and the sea areas a country can claim.
Everything on Spatial Workflow about coastal & marine, in the order that usually works: understand the idea, then run the task, then fix it when it goes wrong. 20 guides in total.
One learning path runs through this topic — follow it if you would rather work through a route than pick a single guide.
🧭 Start with the concepts
The ideas the how-to guides below assume you already have.
- Bathymetry explained: depths, datums and grids bathymetry explained
- Tidal datums explained: which shoreline is the shoreline tidal datum mllw mhhw
- The coastline paradox explained for GIS work coastline paradox gis
- Maritime boundaries explained: EEZ, territorial sea and baselines eez territorial sea explained
- Sea level rise data explained sea level rise data
⚙️ Then do the task
Step-by-step walkthroughs with code you can copy and adapt.
- How to load and plot a bathymetry grid in Python load bathymetry python
- How to extract a coastline from a raster in Python extract coastline raster python
- How to measure shoreline change between two dates shoreline change analysis python
- How to fetch and align tide gauge data in Python tide gauge data python
- How to map coastal inundation from a DEM in Python coastal inundation mapping python
- How to compute distance to the coast for many points distance to coast python
- How to clip a dataset to an exclusive economic zone clip to eez python
- How to clean AIS vessel tracks in Python clean ais data python
- How to generate depth contours from bathymetry depth contours python
- How to subset an ocean model NetCDF by depth and time ocean netcdf subset python
🔧 When it breaks
The errors this topic produces, with the cause explained rather than just the command.
- Bathymetry depths are positive in one file and negative in another bathymetry sign convention
- A coastline or EEZ breaks at the antimeridian antimeridian polygon problem
- An inundation map floods inland areas that cannot flood bathtub inundation wrong
- Tide times are off by hours after a join tide times wrong timezone
- AIS tracks jump across the world ais track jumps
Learning paths through this topic
A curated route rather than a list — the guides in the order that builds on itself.
Related topics
Subjects that keep coming up alongside this one, most overlap first.