S. Export Data from Charts

Owned by Erlend Kvinnesland
Last updated: Oct 21, 2015 by Tore Sannes (Unlicensed)
3 min read

Introduction

Seafloor lets you export Polygons, Points, Surfaces, Hill shades, Contours.

There is a wide range of export possibilities and formats such as, Shapefiles, ASCII-formats, GeoTiff, Irap-formats and VTK.

Exercises

 

Surfaces

Exercise

Export surfaces as Irap ASCII

  1. In the Utilities tab in the Seafloor Main Menu, click Export Chart Data.
  2. Click the Surfaces tab.
  3. Select all the sub-charts.
  4. Select Irap ASCII as the Export Format.
  5. Click the browse icon and select a directory to save the files.
  6. Leave the File name blank. This will cause your files to be named "Seafloor_SubChart-1.ifgr" and so on.
  7. Click Execute.
Exercise

Export surfaces as points

  1. In the Utilities tab in the Seafloor Main Menu, click Export Chart Data.
  2. Click the Points tab.
  3. Check the Seafloor surfaces as points box.
  4. Select all the sub-charts.
  5. Select ASCII Column as the Export Format.
  6. Click the browse icon and select a directory to save the files.
  7. Leave the File name blank. This will cause your files to be named "Seafloor_SubChart-1.asc" and so on.
  8. Click Execute.
Exercise

Try different export formats for surface export

  1. Repeat the previous exercise, but this time use KML and/or Shape as export format.
  2. Try opening the files in another software that can read these files e.g. Google Earth, ArcGIS, QGIS etc.

Note that Google Earth will have problem loading files with large amounts of points. You should try to limit the amount of points to less than 50 000. Right-click a grid and select Properties to see the amounts of points in a grid.
To reduce the amount of points you need to create grids with coarser resolution or create smaller sub charts.

Geocap exports KML-files with default settings (yellow pin for points). If you want to change the visual settings for the KML file, you can use text editors like Emacs or Notepad ++. Read more about KML.

Soundings

Exercise

Export all soundings

  1. In the Utilities tab in the Seafloor Main Menu, click Export Chart Data.
  2. Click the Points tab.
  3. Check the boxes for Soundings, Soundings_Accepted and Soundings_Rejected.
  4. Select all the sub-charts.
  5. Select ASCII Column as the Export Format.
  6. Click the browse icon and select a directory to save the files.
  7. Leave the File name blank.
  8. Click Execute.

This will export three datasets for each sub chart.

Contours

Exercise

Export contour lines to ASCII

  1. On the Utilities tab in the Seafloor Main Menu, click Export Contours.
  2. Check that the Export as: Contour Lines radio button is ticked.
  3. Select the Master Chart.
  4. Set Contouring method to Incerement.
  5. Set Increment (m) to 1.00.
  6. Also consider the parameters Use min level, Use max level, and Invert Z
  7. Check the Save to option File and project.
  8. Select ASCII Column as Export Format.
  9. Click the browse icon and select a directory to save the files.
  10. Enter 1m as a prefix for for the file names.
  11. Click Execute.
  12. Verify that the files are saved on the prefered folder on the disk.
  13. Verify that the selected chart now have a Contours dataset saved in the charts' folder.
Exercise

Export contour lines to KML

  1. Repeat the exercise above, but this time select KML as the export format.
  2. Try to open the exported file in Google Earth
Exercise

Export contour areas

  1. On the Utilities tab in the Seafloor Main Menu, click Export Contours.
  2. Check that the Export as: Contour Areas radio button is ticked.
  3. Select the Master Chart.
  4. Set Contouring method to Incerement.
  5. Set Increment (m) to 5.00.
  6. Check the Save to option File only.
  7. Select Shape as the Export Format.
  8. Click the browse icon and select a directory to save the files.
  9. Enter 5m as a prefix for for the file names.
  10. Click Execute.
  11. Verify that the files are saved on the prefered folder on the disk.

Hillshade

Exercise

Export Hill Shade as GeoTiff

  1. On the Utilities tab in the Seafloor Main Menu, click Export Chart Data.
  2. Click the Hill Shade tab.
  3. Set Altitude deg: to 45.
  4. Set Azimuth deg: to SouthWest.
  5. Set Z Scale: to 10.
  6. Select the Master Chart.
  7. Check the Save to option File and project.
  8. Select GeoTiff as the Export Format.
  9. Click the browse icon and select a directory to save the files.
  10. Enter 45deg_SoutWest_Zx10 as a prefix for for the file name.
  11. Click Execute.
  12. Verify that the file is saved on the prefered folder on the disk.
  13. Right-click the HillShade dataset in the Master Chart folder and select Display.