Sonography of the northern inner continental shelf adjacente to Macau/RN
Northern Inner Continental Shelf, Multibeam
The study área is located on the northern inner continental shelf in the Rio Grande do Norte State, adjacent to Macau city. Sonographic data were acquired in the campaign between 20 July and 1 August, 2008, conducted by the Laboratory of Marine Geology and Geophysics and Environmental Monitoring (GGEMMA) of UFRN. This work has the objective to identify the bedforms and its distribution in the inner shelf. For the acquisition of these data was used a multibeam echosounder, made by Edgetech (model 272-TD Towfish), and towed by the Luana-1 vessel. The Field stage included the acquisition of 21 sonographic lines covering an area of approximately 120 km2. The sonographic data were processed by the SonarWiz software, resulting in the standardization of the mosaic and highlighting of the present features, in order to mainly understand the morphology, geometry and textural patterns of the submerged region. After the processing, the mosaic was exported to Arcgis, where the processes of editing and georeferencing of image were performed. In the northern inner continental shelf were identified 6 textural patterns: regions with a smooth relief without evidence of features (P1), smooth with features oriented to NE-SW (P2), smooth with features oriented to E-W (P3), intermediate without features (P4), rough without features (P5) and very rough (P6)