This line shapefile shows contour coverage of Monterey Bay, California at 10-meter intervals. These data were created from the 20-Meter Bathymetry Grid (bathy20m) using the spatial analyst. Shapefiles for this layer are available in WGS84 and UTM Zone 10 (NAD83) projections. This layer is part of the GIS Data of the Monterey Bay collection, a compilation of data and imagery of the Monterey Bay area, including coastline, imagery, and bathymetry. These data were created as a vector representation of a raster-based bathymetry surface. This collection of data provides documented layers of of the Monterey Bay to persons/institutions of interest throughout the research and educational communities. Hatcher, G. (1998). 10-Meter Bathymetric Contours: Monterey Bay, California, 1997. Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/jw435fb1185 All data are registered to the WGS84 datum with two versions of each feature, image, and grid coverage included on the disk. One is in a Geographic (decimal degrees) coordinate system and the second is in a Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) zone 10 projection.
For strict accuracy and hard-copy production requiring feature, grid, and/or image data, the UTM projection coverages should be used. In fact, some ArcView functions will not be available unless the data are displayed in a projection. This is because a Geographic Coordinate System is NOT a projection but rather a spherical coordinate system dealing directly in latitude and longitude. However, at the scale of maps covering Monterey Bay, the errors produced by ignoring this fact are small.
