Determination of High Arctic regions bathymetry is strictly dependent from weather and ice mass quantity. Due to safety, it is often necessary to use a small boat to study fjords area, especially close to glaciers with unknown bathymetry. This precludes the use of modern multi−beam echosounders, and so traditional single−beam echosounders have been used for bathymetry profiling. Adequate interpolation techniques were determined for the most probable morphological formations in−between bathymetric profiles. Choosing the most accurate interpolation method allows for the determination of geographical regionalisation of submarine elevations of the Brepollen area (inner part of Hornsund, Spitsbergen). It has also been found that bathymetric interpolations should be performed on averaged grid values, rather than individual records. The Ordinary Kriging Method was identified as the most adequate for interpolations and was compared with multi beam scanning, which was possible to make due to a previously modelled single beam interpolation map. In total, eight geographical units were separated in Brepollen, based on the bathymetry, slope and aspect maps. Presented results provide a truly new image of the area, which allow for further understanding of past and present processes in the High Arctic.

The study aimed to apply the protection from damage to engineering facilities located near a planned underwater aggregate extraction. The analysis was conducted in compliance with mining regulations and expert opinions. The study also aimed to assess the precision and correctness of the extraction, due to economic aspects. To reach the goals, in-situ research of the mining area was conducted, with the help of an advanced bathymetric device, based on the USV methodology. The instrument – named by the author as Smart-Sonar-Boat – was especially designed for underwater surveys in open-pit aggregate mines. The study analyzed the “Dwory” open-pit mine, located in southern Poland in the city of Oświęcim. The bathymetric results obtained contributed to improving the observation of changes in the bottom during the extraction. The applied USV method allowed for conducting the reliable evaluation of the mining work.

Various sectors of the economy such as transport and renewable energy have shown great interest in sea bed models. The required measurements are usually carried out by ship-based echo sounding, but this method is quite expensive. A relatively new alternative is data obtained by airborne lidar bathymetry. This study investigates the accuracy of these data, which was obtained in the context of the project ‘Investigation on the use of airborne laser bathymetry in hydrographic surveying’. A comparison to multi-beam echo sounding data shows only small differences in the depths values of the data sets. The IHO requirements of the total horizontal and vertical uncertainty for laser data are met. The second goal of this paper is to compare three spatial interpolation methods, namely Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW), Delaunay Triangulation (TIN), and supervised Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), for the generation of sea bed models. The focus of our investigation is on the amount of required sampling points. This is analyzed by manually reducing the data sets. We found that the three techniques have a similar performance almost independently of the amount of sampling data in our test area. However, ANN are more stable when using a very small subset of points.