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Challenge - Bathymetry

Marine maps are a core component of the Orca experience, with bathymetry (underwater topography) being a key feature. Orca sources bathymetry data from various hydrographic offices (HOs) such as NOAA[1]. However, the quality of this data varies based on coverage, resolution, and freshness.

The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE)[2] provides high-resolution, up-to-date bathymetric survey data, including Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) from multibeam sonar surveys. While USACE also provides contour polygons, these are often jagged and not ideal for visualization.

Task

Your task is to build an end-to-end solution that processes DEM data from USACE, generates smoothed bathymetric contours, and displays these contours on a vector map.

Details

Your solution should include the following key elements:

  1. Data Download

    • Retrieve a small subset of USACE survey data (e.g., DEM files for a specific region).

  2. Data Processing

    • Process the DEM data to generate smoothed contour polygons at reasonable depth intervals (e.g., 0m, 0.5m, 1m, 2m, 5m, 10m).
    • USACE hydro survey data contains DEMs and processed contour polygons. We don’t want their contour polygons as they are jagged in many cases. Come up with a way to produce non-jagged contours from the DEMs.
    • Store the processed bathymetry contours in a PostGIS database.

  3. Vector Tile Serving

    • Serve the bathymetric contours as Mapbox Vector Tiles (MVT) directly from the PostGIS database.

  4. Map Visualization

    • Create a web-based map using Mapbox GL-JS or MapLibre GL-JS.
    • Add a bathymetry layer styled in shades of blue to represent different depth intervals.
    • Overlay this layer on a default Mapbox basemap.

Notes

  • We value simplicity and elegance as opposed to over-engineering. Focus on functional, efficient solutions over perfect code quality.
  • You are encouraged to use existing tools and libraries to focus on solving the core problem efficiently. Document tool choices and rationale in the README.
  • The solution should demonstrate reasonable performance in generating contours from the DEM data, generating vector tiles from the contour polygons and loading and rendering the map.
  • Provide basic documentation in the form of a README file with clear setup and execution instructions (dependencies, database setup, configs, etc.).
  • Include strategies (if applicable) for optimizing processing workflows (e.g., leveraging PostGIS functions, batch processing).

Deliverable

  1. Code Repository: Preferably a GitHub repository.
  2. Video Demo: A short video demonstrating how the solution works end-to-end including the final map visualization.

References