Kubla Cubed User Manual
Coordinates
Kubla Cubed uses a Cartesian co-ordinate system, either in metres (mE, mN) or feet (ftE, ftN). The co-ordinate system is not defined in the software, and it’s up to the user to ensure that all the data they are loading are in a consistent Cartesian co-ordinate system.
In coastal engineering it is common to have data in a spherical co-ordinate system (°E, °N). If you have such data, you will need to use other software to convert into a Cartesian co-ordinate system of your choice, such as UTM, before importing into Kubla Cubed. If you have raster images in spherical co-ordinates that you want to load as site plans, you should ideally use software to skew them into your chosen Cartesian co-ordinate system before loading them as site plans.
Processing Bathymetry
Perhaps one of the biggest challenges with coastal engineering projects is the wide range of bathymetric data that may be available. Typical sources of bathymetric information range from PDF contour maps, to raw data from echo sounders in text files. Kubla Cubed can combine data from a range of sources, but like any ground modelling software, careful consideration needs to be given to how you define your bathymetry.
Since Kubla Cubed is based on Triangulated Irregular Networks (TINs), it’s quite possible to combine a range of disparate sources of bathymetry data. E.g. 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 is likely to need to be processed before it will be usable in Kubla Cubed. Processing is required both to remove outliers and erroneous soundings, and also to thin the data to prevent the software from slowing down to a point where it is 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 to ensure accuracy, while not being so dense that the software becomes difficult to use.