Gridded bathymetry for Lake Malawi (Nyasa), East Africa (within Malawi, Tanzania, Mozambique)

This gridded bathymetry is the best publicly available rendering of the bathymetry of the entirety of the lake generated to date. The results of this work are presented in: Lyons, et al., 2011, Late Quaternary stratigraphic analysis of the Lake Malawi Rift, East Africa: an integration of drill-core and seismic reflection data, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, v. 303, pp. 20-37. The gridded bathymetry data were generated from lake floor horizons interpreted from legacy multichannel and single-channel seismic reflection data from as early as 1985, and not from hydrographic surveys. Accordingly there is considerable error associated with lake floor horizon picks. Primary data quality varied widely. Positioning information is derived from autonomous GPS data or from Transit Satellite data collected during seismic acquisition, and positioning quality varies widely. See the Lyons et al., 2011 paper for specific information on primary data. Gridding and masking was performed in GMT using the surface function after the data was meaned in blocks of 15 arcsecond (~450m) bins to reduce spatial aliasing and eliminate redundant data. This grid is a minimum curvature solution (i.e. T = 0). Depths are in meters, positive downwards, and are relative to the lake surface. The grid is in GeoTIFF grid format.