The Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) Bureau of Beaches and Coastal Systems (BBCS) Reconnaissance Offshore Regional Sand Search (ROSS) web site is a provider of information between the BBCS, consultants and the public. Through the ROSS web page, the user can access many types of data including coastal and offshore bathymetry, seismic and side scan sonar images, sediment grain size distribution, core photos, core logs, core descriptions, Munsell Color, and metadata (information about the original data).
The project team at URS has spent many hours constructing the ROSS web site to be user friendly, intuitive and easy to use. A large portion of this site has been built around Geographic Information System (GIS) technology. URS has chosen to use ESRI's suite of software products, including Arc Internet Map Server (ArcIMS). ArcIMS allows users to view spatial data over the web with simple tools for display and manipulation (see FAQ’s below).
Maps,reports and data in other formats are available to the user from the Downloads page. From this page the user can also download the same data found on the ROSS interactive map site in the form of shapefiles. A shapefile contains data from a relational database management system (RDBMS) which can be pulled out in a stand alone portable format. Once downloaded and brought into ArcView on a local machine, high end data analysis may be accomplished. One other way that the user may perform high end data analysis is to retrieve the data from the Oracle database through the Enhanced Query Builder (EQB). This tool allows the user to download all data needed in a tab delimited- text file format ready to be used by various analytical and graphing software packages (for example Microsoft Excel).
From the related links page, the web-user can access other useful project sites with relevant reconnaissance information including inlet management (Army Core of Engineers Coastal Inlet Research Program- ACOE CIRP), granulometric data (Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research- Instaar), and environmental concerns (Florida Geographic Data Library- FGDL).
Two very important points need to be made regarding the use of the data available from the ROSS web site:
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