Three-dimensional desktop morphometric models for the Arctic Ocean floor

Abstract. We present results of the first phase of an ongoing project to create a system for three-dimensional (3D) geomorphometric modeling of the Arctic Ocean submarine topography. In this phase, we developed a testing, lowresolution desktop version of the system. We utilized a small, 5-km gridded digital elevation model (DEM) extracted from the International Bathymetric Chart of the Arctic Ocean (IBCAO) version 3.0. From the smoothed DEM, we derived digital models of several morphometric variables: horizontal, vertical, minimal, and maximal curvatures, catchment and dispersive areas, as well as topographic and stream power indices. To construct and visualize 3D morphometric models, we applied an original approach for 3D terrain modeling in the environment of the Blender package, free and open-source software. Finally, we present a series of 3D morphometric models with perspective views from the Atlantic, Eurasia, the Pacific, and North America. The experiment showed that the approach is efficient and can be used for creating next, desktop and web versions of the system for visualizing 3D morphometric models of higher resolutions.