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March 10, 2021

Hello Coast Survey,

I am happy to have the opportunity to open the Coast Survey bi-weekly newsletter this week to talk to you about raster chart sunsetting and the NOAA Custom Chart application. As many of you likely saw, last week Coast Survey announced the cancellation of the first chart of the raster sunset process, chart 18665 of Lake Tahoe. This initial chart cancellation was intended to test the various systems and processes involved in announcing and cancelling a chart, for example, the Coast Guard’s Local Notice to Mariners system. In the coming months, we will continue the cancellation of additional charts, with all traditional paper and raster charts to be discontinued by January 2025. For more information on raster chart sunsetting please visit this website

This of course is part of Coast Survey’s initiative to focus on the NOAA ENC® as the primary product for navigation, and there are several efforts underway to improve our electronic charts, such as the ENC re-scheming project. That said, we also recognize that there will always be a desire for a paper product, whether to have on the chart table of your vessel for general reference, or simply to view in a format larger than what can be displayed on a monitor. To that end, the Marine Chart Division is developing the NOAA Custom Chart (NCC) application, which can create a customized chart from our ENC data. The NCC allows a user to define the scale, paper size, and limits of the chart they desire, and download a printable PDF of the chart created. In the future, users may be able to print a custom chart using a NOAA print-on-demand vendor. The current version is still a prototype under testing and development, but we expect to release version 1.0 of the application at the end of this month. Many improvements have been made in recent months, including changes to chart symbols that give them more of the look and feel of a NOAA chart. I encourage everyone to try out the NOAA Custom Chart and submit feedback which will help us make it a better product.

Thanks OCS!

CAPT E.J. Van Den Ameele
Chief, Marine Chart Division

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