Kubla Cubed User Manual
Coordinates
Kubla Cubed uses a Cartesian coordinate system, either in metres (mE, mN) or feet (ftE, ftN). The coordinate system is not defined in the software, and it’s up to the user to ensure that all the data they are loading is in a consistent Cartesian coordinate system.
In coastal engineering, it is common to have data in a spherical coordinate system (°E, °N). If you have such data, you will need to use other software to convert it into a Cartesian coordinate system of your choice, such as UTM, before importing into Kubla Cubed. If you have raster images in spherical coordinates that you want to load as site plans, you should ideally use software to skew them into your chosen Cartesian coordinate system before loading them as site plans.
Processing Bathymetry
One of the biggest challenges with coastal engineering projects is dealing with a wide range of bathymetric data sources, from PDF contour maps to raw data from echo sounders in text files. Kubla Cubed can combine data from various sources, but like any ground modelling software, careful consideration needs to be given to how you define your bathymetry.
As Kubla Cubed is based on Triangulated Irregular Networks (TINs), it’s possible to combine a range of disparate sources of bathymetry data. For example, one part of the site may have high-resolution gridded data from a bathymetric survey, while another part may only have data from contour lines traced off a PDF.
Bathymetric data as received from echo-sounding likely needs processing before being usable in Kubla Cubed. Processing is required to remove outliers and erroneous soundings, and also to thin the data to prevent the software from becoming slow and unusable. Bathymetric processing is a specialist task and beyond the scope of Kubla Cubed, so it must be done in other software before importing. Typically, the data might be gridded before being imported into Kubla Cubed. The grid resolution should be adequate for accuracy without being so dense that the software becomes difficult to use.