Improvement of the arctic ocean bathymetry and regional tide atlas: First result on evaluating existing arctic ocean bathymetric models

The quality of existing bathymetry models for the Arctic Ocean is evaluated through visual comparison and the response of modelled tides. The high resolution ArcTide 2017 hydrodynamic model was used to evaluate the bathymetry in selected shallow water regions where tides are significant. The Southern Barents Sea was identified as a problematic region where inconsistencies were identified, resulting from methods used to patch in regional models and incorrect definitions of coastlines and depths. More generally, the investigation shows that careful verifications are needed to ensure seamless transitions between bathymetry datasets. More accurate bathymetry in the Arctic Ocean is needed and we outline the development of a new Arctic bathymetry using bathymetry inversion which uses a combination of the existing Arctic bathymetry and topography inverted from a band-pass filtered version of the most recent DTU17 gravity field. We also illustrate the regions where we find adequate spatial correlation to perform such inversion.