Plotting Smith and Sandwell global seafloor topography grids in ArcGIS Desktop?

Question

Does anybody have any experience with plotting Smith & Sandwell 2-minute Mercator-projected grids in ArcGIS?

I've downloaded one in two formats: ers and img. I've found tools for processing .img data called Generic Mapping Tools (GMT).

Within this library there are commands which allow manipulating img grids, which is just what I need.

This example uses the img2grd command which I can't find within the GMT library.

The only tool I found so far was img2mercgrd but it wasn't successful.

How can I process this dataset to GIS format?

Exactly how did img2mercgrd fail?
– whuber
Apr 6, 2012 at 21:30 — whuber, Apr 6, 2012 at 21:30

PolyGeo · Accepted Answer · 2016-03-20 07:47:53Z

2

Try to make use of the utility gdal_translate

gdal_translate -of AAIGrid input.img output.grd

PolyGeo♦

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answered Mar 28, 2012 at 15:47

SaultDon

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SaultDon,Thanks for your suggestion. I actually managed after all to get the .grd file out through Cygwin library. However the problem is with processing with the actual dataset - it is in a spherical Mercator projection which is tricky to work out in ArcGIS. I work with topo11.1 img (+.ers) dataset version. So the next step is to work it up into a correctly projected and valid GIS format. Any suggestions??? Many thanks!
– Magda
Mar 29, 2012 at 8:26
So you are looking to reproject the data? Try searching the stackexchange for those questions (keywords: project spherical mercator - for example) and see if someone has a similar case to yours. If not, you may be able to post another question.
– SaultDon
Mar 29, 2012 at 16:41

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