Redlands, California, USA—The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has formally accepted a new ESRI-based system that improves how the organisation produces its national suite of nautical charts. The system, Nautical Chart System II (NCS II), will utilise ESRI’s Production Line Tool Set (PLTS) for ArcGIS—Nautical Solution to produce more than 1,000 paper nautical charts and provide complete coverage in NOAA’s equivalent Electronic Navigational Chart (ENC) format based on the International Hydrographic Organization S-57 standard.
NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey initiated the project to develop an integrated production system with Fairfax, Virginia-based ManTech International Corporation and ESRI. In February 2009, NOAA accepted Nautical Solution as core to the management of hydrographic information and the production of digital and hard-copy nautical charts. Nautical Solution is a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) geographic information system (GIS) that creates and maintains nautical charts from a product-neutral, centralized database. Nautical Solution gives NOAA the ability to fuse existing databases and workflows into a comprehensive production system.
The organisation expects NCS II to decrease production time for charts significantly, by allowing timely and frequent updates. The streamlined workflows and improved data management will increase NOAA’s ability to respond to coast-altering events, as well as improve the accuracy of charts and ensure greater navigational safety and better coastal management. NOAA will have the ability to offer new products and Web services within NOAA and to end users of the data.
