In Wikipedia we have an ongoing discussion about the accurate area of Yemen. There exists several different figures. The todays boundary was defined in the treaty of Djiddah in 2000, that points to the boundary line of 1934. The actual boundary line of 1934 then was tried to reconstructed and demarcated within in the following years. The German foreign ministry says, that because of this uncertainties the accurate area cannot be calculated at present.
My question is now: what is the source of the Yemen boundary in NaturalEarth? How reliable is it?
Regards
Alex
For a higher resolution look at the border, please reference the US State Department’s GIS of international boundaries. Their database is more accurate to 1:250,000 scale than Natural Earth’s which is to 1:10,000,000.
https://hiu.state.gov/data/data.aspx
Department of State’s Office of the Geographer (INR/GGI) – Large Scale International Boundaries (LSIB), EURASIA- September 2012
“From the Department of State’s Office of the Geographer (INR/GGI), the LSIB is believed to be the most accurate available worldwide international boundary vector line file. The lines reflect U.S. government (USG) policy and thus not necessarily de facto control. The LSIB has no known errors in boundary location of over 4 km, and is generally accurate to within a kilometer or less. The boundary line depiction research (“recovery” of the authoritative location of the line) has been done over the past decade or so by geographers at the State Department and colleagues from other agencies, and is based on modern imagery, elevation data, relevant maps, treaties, international arbitration and court rulings, and other sources. The LSIB is frequently updated.”
Thank you very much for the info about LSIB.
I tried the Data from Natural Earth 1:10 Mio and LSIB now to calculate the area:
LSIB: ~ 458 000 km²
NEA: ~ 458 300 km²
But several other sources like the CIA World Factbook say something about 527 968 km² or 537.000 km²
The German Auswärtiges Amt says, that the area is currently not known exactly but guessed between 478 000 und 533 000
I try to find out, whether those figures in CIA WF (et al.) are wrong or the boundaries in the GIS data sets are wrong. At some point there must be a larger error.
I guess, I’ve forgotten to add the territorial water zone (22 km) – so that could explain the difference to the figures from CIA World FactBook
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