Background

The Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 established a fishery conservation zone contiguous to the territorial sea of the United States, effective March 1, 1977. The outer boundary of the zone is a line drawn in such a manner that each point on it is 200-nautical miles from the baseline from which the breadth of the territorial sea is measured. The EEZ was established by Presidential Proclamation, effective March 10, 1983. For information about other U.S. maritime boundaries, please go to http://nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/csdl/mbound.htm.

About the Data

The Exclusive Economic Zone data is listed by region and is contained within zipped files. Within each zipped file, there are two sets of files-- 1) a dbase IV file containing points representing the outer boundary and 2) a shapefile representing the points as a single polyline.  The dbase file has 9 fields called LATDEG, LATMIN, LATSEC, LATDIR, LONGDEG, LONGMIN, LONGSEC, LONGDIR, and SOURCE. The SOURCE field identifies the points as having been taken from the Federal Register, August 23, 1995, "Exclusive Economic Zone and Maritime Boundaries: Notice of Limits" (Search at the following link: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/fr/search.html) or measured 200 nautical miles from the baseline.

The points that were generated from the baseline were created by a computer program which doesn't distinguish between East and West longitude. The longitudes in these files are measured West from Greenwich (even past the 180th meridian) unless specifically stated as "E."  This is the convention for precise geodetic computations at the National Ocean Service (NOS) and these coordinates were computed on the North American Datum of 1927. Both the current edition and these files of coordinates may be superseded by the publication of a new chart edition. These files may or may not be current. Periodically, new files will be added with FGDC-compliant metadata. The new files will include a delimited text file of coordinates along the EEZ limit and a polyline shapefile.

Please click on your area of interest and download the zipped files. If you do not have software to view these shapefiles, ESRI has a free viewer to download at http://www.esri.com/software/arcexplorer/download.html.  To view the shapefiles in any GIS, you will need to extract the shapefiles from the zip file.  Within ArcExplorer, you can load and view the shapefiles using the "Add Layers."

Alaska (2007 update)	American Samoa
Caribbean (2006 update)	East Coast (2006 update)
Gulf of Mexico (2007 update)	Hawai'ian Islands (2008 update)
Howland and Baker Island (2008 update)	Jarvis Island (2008 update)
Johnston Island (2008 update)	Northern Mariana Islands
Palmyra Atoll-Kingman Reef	Wake Island (2008 update)
West Coast (2007 update)

Revised Monday June 02 2008by OCS Webmaster