NOAA’s five year plan to cease publishing paper charts and electronic PDF images – Raster charts

Digital updates are easier, quicker, and increase mariner safety – it says

The USA’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has begun its plan to scrap paper charts, with the first of its 1,000+ nautical charts ceasing publication.
The chart chosen to be the first to go is Lake Tahoe – on the California – Nevada border officially known as chart 18665. The chart is popular with recreational boaters but the latest edition has a note in the bottom left corner saying this is the last paper edition and it will be canceled on August 26.
in February its suite ofas well as scrapping its PDFs of nautical chart images – Raster Navigational Charts
RasterNOAA also maintains a suite of over 1,000 paper nautical charts, which are printed and distributed through NOAA’s certified print-on-demand (POD) chart agents. Other NOAA products, based on the paper chart images created for POD, consist of Raster Navigational Charts (NOAA RNC®), full-size nautical chart images in Portable Document Format (PDF), and reduced scale 8.5″ x 11″ size BookletCharts™. The RNC Tile Service and online RNC Viewer are also part of NOAA’s raster chart production.
February 26, 2021 NOAA will begin to implement its sunset plan for paper nautical charts this month, starting with the current paper chart 18665 of Lake Tahoe. After August, NOAA’s electronic navigational chart will be the only NOAA nautical chart of the area.

This is the first traditional paper chart to be fully supplanted by an electronic chart as part of NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey Raster Sunset Plan, which includes a new process to notify mariners of the transition of individual paper charts to electronic charts. These charts are easier to update and maintain, keeping mariners safer with up-to-date information on marine hazards.

As part of the sunset plan, first released in 2019, mariners will be officially notified of this chart’s cancellation in the U.S. Coast Guard Local Notice to Mariners.

NOAA will continue to announce the cancellation of additional paper charts as the sunset plan progresses, initially based on volume of sales or downloads, and in regions with improved NOAA electronic navigational chart coverage. Cancellation of all traditional paper and associated raster chart products will be completed by January 2025.

NOAA announced the start of a five-year process to end traditional paper nautical chart production in late 2019 via a Federal Register Notice. While NOAA is sunsetting its traditional nautical chart products, it is undertaking a major effort to improve the data consistency and provide larger scale coverage within its electronic navigational chart product suite.

Over the next four years, NOAA will work to ease the transition to electronic products by providing access to paper chart products based on electronic data. The online NOAA Custom Chart tool enables users to create their own paper and PDF charts from the latest NOAA ENC data.

IMRAY’s Lucy Wilson commented: The title of this article implies that NOAA are phasing out paper charts altogether. But, actually they phased out their own printing of paper charts in 2014 and now just leave that to certified print on demand agents. This is the next step in that outsourcing process. They are phasing out the curated selection of chart areas (ie raster PDFs) which they currently provide, and pushing the responsibility to the customer to choose the chart area. The customer will then be able to order a paper chart on demand based on ENC data.

At Imray, we already derive many of our paper/raster charts from ENC data from other Hydro Offices and it’s not that great a leap to let the customer choose their own area and print it on demand.