Introduction

The North Sea Digital Atlas (NSDA) provides a modern, adaptable digital map library of the North Sea. First made available to the industry in 1993, the Atlas has progressed and following a major update has been released by PGS as version NSDA-2.0 in 2003. NSDA-Public utilises the NSDA 2.0 database which has then been sub-sampled to a coarser 10km grid for a reduced number of horizons. Contributions to the North Sea Digital Atlas Public Licence package (NSDA-Public) have come from PGS, Landmark, IHS Energy, DTI and ARK.

The NSDA-Public has been specifically designed to aid in the accessibility of the data for the industry, academia and the general public. With downloadable seismic time structure maps in Adobe Acrobat PDF format, produced at 1:1,000,000 scale and basic data provided in the form of digital grids (ZMap ASCII format) with a grid node spacing of 10 km.

The North Sea Digital Atlas has been produced from the interpretation of 108,000 line km of 2D seismic data, along with well data from the 920 control wells which has been compiled into a database (MS Access format). NSDA-Public package comprises gridded two-way-time structure maps of 12 horizons of the most important stratigraphic boundaries in the North Sea basin. For each horizon, its extent and character is described in diagrammatic and literal form (Table 1).

Lithostratigraphic correlation diagrams across the basin are included, to show the relationship between the interpreted horizons and the local lithostratigraphy.