Use of a geophysical database in navy operational systems

The Naval Oceanographic Office has constructed a high-resolution geophysical database (GDB) for the Western Barents Sea describing the properties of the seafloor and subsurface sediment layers important to acoustic modeling. The original implementation of this database used a public domain geographic information system (GIS) called GRASS (Geographic Resource Analysis Support System). Subsequent versions use a commercial GIS, ARC/INFO. While GRASS and subsequently ARC/INFO address the needs of the Naval Oceanographic Office as well as the R&D community currently using GDB, its large data files, GIS system size, and database access time, limit the use of this database on Navy operational systems, where access time and disk space are limited. Additionally, the data stored in GDB are not immediately compatible with the Navy´s standard propagation loss models. This paper discusses efforts made toward porting the Western Barents Sea GDB onto an operational system which include regionalizing the data to accommodate severe disk space limitations, new storage and retrieval methods, and on-the-fly conversion of GDB data to data types compatible with Navy standard models. The result is a full implementation of the Barents Sea GDB on a PC-based model operating system, without sacrificing many appealing features of the GIS