The recent discussion of ETOPO2 for creating ROMS grids reminded me of something folks building grids will likely find useful. I have put a collection of global and regional bathymetric grids on our THREDDS server, which means that you can access the data via OpenDAP, Web Coverage Service, or a web-form driven NetCDF Subsetter, which returns the subsetted and possibly subsampled region as a NetCDF file to your disk.
For global topography/bathymetry, I have ETOPO2 (2 min), Smith & Sandwell 9.1 (1 min), several versions of SRTM30+ (0.5 min), and then some various higher resolution regional grids (including all of the NOAA Coastal Relief Model for US coastal waters).
You can access the topography data via OpenDAP, WCS and the NetCDF Subset service by browsing to:
http://coast-enviro.er.usgs.gov/thredds ... talog.html
If you want to do the NetCDF subsetting graphically, you can use the stand-alone version of the Environmental Data Connector (EDC), available at:
http://www.pfeg.noaa.gov/products/EDC/E ... alone.html
Fire up the EDC (a Java application) and then just enter the following URL as your "Catalog URL" and hit "submit":
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http://coast-enviro.er.usgs.gov/thredds/bathy_catalog.xml-Rich