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Dave Monahan

Affiliate Assistant Research Professor

Dave Monaham served for 33 years in the Canadian Hydrographic Service, working his way down from Research Scientist to Director. During that time, he established the bathymetric mapping program and mapped most Canadian waters, built the Fifth Edition of GEBCO, led the development of LIDAR, developed and led the CHS Electronic Chart production program, and was Canadian representative on a number of international committees and boards. He has mentored a few people who became Directors, steered CHS through the conversion to NAD 83 and the introduction of GPS, with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory he performed the first world-scale comparison of satellite and acoustic bathymetric data. He designed an algorithm for contouring bathymetry data from random, widely-spaced tracks, made the over ice spot sounding survey pattern more efficient, conducted field studies and authored papers on sea floor geomorphology all around Canada, in adjacent oceanic basins as well as off Senegal/Gambia, Peru and Guyana. Dave also wrote an International Hydrographic Bureau standard, published over ninety maps and a hundred papers and got Canada to ratify UNCLOS. He also did a lot of management things large and small but has no real memory of them.

Before joining the Canadian government he was research assistant to the late Mike Keen at Dalhousie University during the exciting period when the theory of Plate Tectonics was the subject of hearty debate.

With degrees in Science, in Arts and in Engineering, he is almost diverse enough to understand how little humankind knows about the ocean. He has been Adjunct Professor in the Department of Geography at Carleton University and continues to hold a similar position in the Department of Geodesy and Geomatics Engineering at the University of New Brunswick.