NOAA's NCS II Centralises Chart Production

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA, USA) has implemented a new nautical charting system based on Esri GIS technology to produce more navigational products than ever before without increasing its budget or personnel needs. The new system, NCS II, is based on Esri Nautical Solution, and it allows NOAA to centralise the management of hydrographic data for US coastal waters.  

Since accepting Esri Nautical Solution as part of its production system in 2009, NOAA has been transferring product production from disparate systems to NCS II. As a result, NOAA will produce more than 2,000 nautical charts that meet the organization's high standards, and it has transferred its entire Electronic Navigational Chart (ENC) catalog of more than 800 products into Esri Nautical Solution.

 

Esri Nautical Solution is off-the-shelf software with a central geodatabase designed to allow users to create, maintain and archive navigational data.  As changes are made to the data, updates are automatically posted to relevant products instead of each navigational product having to be maintained on its own, the traditional process for maintaining chart data.