Category: GIS

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Online NOAA Custom Chart lets boaters create their own charts

NOAA Custom Chart makes it easy for users to create a personalized chart.

A prototype version of a powerful new online tool, NOAA Custom Chart, is now available for boaters and other nautical chart users. The application enables users to define the scale and paper size of custom-made nautical charts centered on a position of their choosing. Once the functionality of this prototype is fully developed, NOAA Custom Chart will be an easy way for boaters to create a paper or digital back-up for the electronic chart system or other GPS-enabled chart display that they are using on board.
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NOAA Office of Coast Survey wraps up a busy 2017 hurricane season

The 2017 Atlantic hurricane season was powerful, with the strongest storms occurring consecutively from late August to early October. The sequential magnitude of four hurricanes in particular—Harvey, Irma, Maria, and Nate—made response efforts challenging for NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey. Coast Survey summarized this season’s response efforts along with the efforts of NOAA Ship Thomas Jefferson (operated by NOAA’s Office of Marine and Aviation Operations) in the following story map. Continue reading “NOAA Office of Coast Survey wraps up a busy 2017 hurricane season”

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NOAA Ship Rainier surveys the waters around Kodiak Island

by ENS Michelle Levano

Kodiak Island is the 2nd largest island in the United States; it is part of the Kodiak Island Archipelago, a group of islands roughly the size of Connecticut. Due to the island’s location in the Gulf of Alaska and North Pacific Ocean, Kodiak is ranked as third in commercial fishing ports in the U.S. in terms of value of seafood landed. In 2015, the Port of Kodiak was responsible for 514 million pounds of fish and $138 million of product. More than one-third of the jobs in Kodiak are related to the fishing industry.
The Port of Kodiak is home to more than 700 commercial fishing vessels, and has more than 650 boat slips and three commercial piers that can dock vessels up to 1,000 feet. In addition to fishing, Kodiak is the hub of the Gulf of Alaska container logistics system, serving the southwest Alaskan communities with consumer goods and outbound access to the world’s fish markets. Continue reading “NOAA Ship Rainier surveys the waters around Kodiak Island”

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Introducing NOAA’s new ENC Direct to GIS

ENCDirectFeatures in an electronic navigational chart represent thousands of pieces of data describing the coastal and marine environment. This data includes coastal topography, bathymetry, landmarks, geographic place names, and marine boundaries for the specific geographic region encompassed by the chart. What if we could aggregate the ENC features into a geospatial database? Such a product would provide a continuous depiction of the U.S coastal and marine environment.
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