Category: navigational charts

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Coast Survey launches NOAA Chart Display Service

This is a graphic showing an electronic navigational chart depicting the entrance to the Columbia River and Astoria, Oregon. Graphical information on the chart is rendered by the new NOAA Chart Display Service and shows traditional paper chart symbols.

The new NOAA Chart Display Service (NCDS) renders NOAA electronic navigational chart (NOAA ENC®) data with “traditional paper chart” symbology in online and offline applications for which a basemap of nautical chart data is desired, including GIS, web-based, and mobile mapping applications. The new service uses symbols, labels, and color schemes familiar to those who have used NOAA paper nautical charts or the NOAA Custom Chart application. NCDS is available as Esri REST Map Service, OGC Web Map Service (WMS), and MBTiles formats.

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The nautical chart update process – build it and we will chart it

Nautical charts are updated with the most current information available through several processes and workflows within NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey. The large majority of these updates consist of revisions to water depth information. The bottom of a water body is changeable by nature, thus hydrographic surveys are constantly necessary to show contemporary depths in a given body of water. What doesn’t happen quite as often are changes to land along the coast, altering the way inlets, harbor entrances, and river mouths appear from a bird’s eye view. Unless there has been a catastrophic event, these changes in land are usually the result of human interaction.

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Coast Survey to shut down the Raster Navigational Chart Tile Service and other related services

NOAA will shut down its Raster Navigational Chart (RNC) Tile Service and the online RNC Viewer on October 1, 2021. The NOAA Seamless Raster Navigational Chart Services will be shut down on January 1, 2022. This is part of a larger NOAA program to end production and maintenance of all NOAA traditional paper and raster nautical charts that was announced in the Federal Register in November 2019.

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NOAA’s Precision Marine Navigation data service receives first major update

The Precision Marine Navigation (PMN) program has completed the first update of its prototype navigation data service – the PMN data processing and dissemination system and PMN Data Gateway viewer. The data processing and dissemination system provides surface current forecast guidance from NOAA’s forecast systems, in a prototype marine navigation data format. The viewer allows users to visualize the predictions and discover where they are. Both the system and the viewer were updated to include data from the recently upgraded Northern Gulf of Mexico Operational Forecast System (NGOFS2).

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NOAA Ship Thomas Jefferson returns to survey approaches to Chesapeake Bay during the 2020 field season

NOAA Ship Thomas Jefferson

By Hydrographic Assistant Survey Technician Sophia Tigges

For the first portion of the 2020 field season, NOAA Ship Thomas Jefferson surveyed approaches to Chesapeake Bay. Thomas Jefferson’s 2020 field season consisted of two 45-day “bubble” periods. A “bubble period” is the time a ship closes to personnel transfer while they shelter in place for seven days and undergo COVID-19 testing per NOAA’s Office of Marine and Aviation Operation’s COVID-19 protocol to mitigate exposure. The ship spent the entire first bubble working off the coast of North Carolina and Virginia for this project. These surveys served as a continuation of the ship’s work in the area in the 2019 season.  (To learn more about Thomas Jefferson’s work in this area last year, read the 2019 post titled, “NOAA Ship Thomas Jefferson tests innovative DriX unmanned surface vehicle.”

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Nautical charts reflect alternate route along Gulf Intracoastal Waterway

Portion of Chandeleur Sound Gulf Intracoastal Waterway alternate route.

In anticipation of the temporary closure of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway (GIWW)’s Inner Harbor Canal Lock, the Office of Coast Survey released three updated NOAA electronic navigational charts (NOAA ENC®) reflecting the Chandeleur Sound Alternate Route and the addition of 97 Aids to Navigation (ATON). The updated charts include US5LA24M, US4LA34M, and US4MS12M and can be viewed in NOAA’s ENC Viewer or downloaded from NOAA’s Chart Locator.

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NOAA Coast Survey’s new strategy supports charting mandates and broader seafloor mapping

This week, NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey released the Mapping U.S. Marine and Great Lakes Waters: Office of Coast Survey Contributions to a National Ocean Mapping Strategy. This report is part of NOAA’s ongoing commitment to meet core surveying and nautical charting mandates while supporting broader needs to fill gaps in seafloor mapping and environmental sciences.

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Nautical Chart Manual guides cartographers for 100 years

By John Macek

This July marks the 100th anniversary of the Office of Coast Survey’s Nautical Chart Manual. First published on July 10, 1920, as Special Publication No. 66, under the title “RULES AND PRACTICE RELATING TO CONSTRUCTION OF NAUTICAL CHARTS”, the 34- page pamphlet codified the essential guidelines to be used by cartographers of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey.

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