Digital bathymetric and shoreline data of Lake Balaton, Hungary

Lake Balaton, the largest shallow lake in Central Europe, has high environmental and economic importance, yet its last comprehensive bathymetric survey was conducted approximately five decades ago. This data serves the digital preservation of the cartographic outputs from a major survey campaign carried out in the late 1970s, ensuring long-term usability of the historical data before original sources degrade or become inaccessible. The original 1:25,000-scale contour maps were georeferenced and digitized to produce vector shoreline features, reed margins, and bathymetric contours. The published dataset also includes quality control information such as survey line geometry, endpoints, georeferencing transformation errors, and absolute positional errors of shoreline structures. Additionally, derived raster products of water depth and absolute lakebed elevation at 100 m spatial resolution are provided. Vector files are in shapefile format, raster grids are provided as GeoTif files in the published zip file. More details are under review in Kovács & Tóth 2026 Scientific Data journal. Together, these datasets enable detailed visualization of lakebed morphology and support geological, morphological, and hydrographic analyses.