Cartography as a career

Kathryn O’Neill, a nautical cartographer with NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey, shares what it’s like to create the charts that help ships navigate throughout our coastal regions.

Nautical charts are essential for helping vessels navigate safely throughout our coastal regions, providing critical information on water depth, underwater hazards, coastal features, and more. Creating a nautical chart requires a blend of science, math, technology, and careful design to turn complex ocean data into a clear, easy-to-understand format.

So who does this important work? Behind every chart is a cartographer — or a professional chartmaker — responsible for incorporating measurements and observations into one cohesive nautical chart. In the interview below, you’ll meet Kathryn O’Neill, a nautical cartographer with NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey. Kathryn describes what it’s like to be a cartographer, how she got started in the field, and the education and skills needed to pursue a career in cartography.

What is your educational background, and what kind of education do you need to succeed in cartography?

I graduated from Boston University with a bachelor’s degree in environmental science and minors in English and biology. I later earned a master’s degree from the University of Maryland in geospatial information sciences, or GIScience. While GIScience-specific programs are closest to our jobs as cartographers, similar backgrounds such as geography, geology, earth science, and marine science are examples of other tracks that could offer similar skills and development.

How did you decide to pursue cartography as a career?

As an undergrad studying environmental science, I took a few Geographic Information Systems, or GIS, and remote sensing courses and really became interested in the mapping side of environmental studies. I then decided to pursue a graduate degree in GIS and, through connections there, happily landed at NOAA as a cartographer.

What do you like best about being a cartographer?

The charts! I truly love seeing the visual culmination of our work, and knowing our products directly contribute to the safety of navigation gives me a sense of purpose and mission that motivates me each day.

Is there anything else you’d like to share about the education, skills, or training someone needs to become a cartographer?

The digital tools we use for cartography are a major part of our jobs. Familiarity with software like ArcGIS and programming languages like Python goes a long way toward understanding our day-to-day responsibilities. Critical thinking and data analysis are also important for interpreting the data we use and understanding the impacts our products have in the real world.

Kathryn pilots a survey vessel on the water.

Are there different specialties in cartography? If so, can you tell me how the education or training requirements for those specialties differ?

My specific role is that of a nautical cartographer, meaning I produce charts to a highly specific international standard for use in maritime navigation. There are many other specialities, even within NOAA, ranging from non-navigational products such as harmful algal bloom, or HAB, maps, habitat suitability analyses, weather models, and magnetic anomaly maps, just to name a few. The education and training requirements can vary widely depending on the intended use of a cartographic product. Still, charts can be seen as a thread that runs between many scientific disciplines to visualize data or tell a story.

Do cartographers work in different departments or roles, such as data formatting or quality control?

Absolutely! In addition to production cartographers, we also have those who work on incoming data, chart distribution, tools and programming, policy and standards, and quality control and validation. That’s just within the Marine Chart Division! Cartographers can be found throughout NOAA performing a variety of chart-related roles.

How do cartographers receive the data and information for chart updates?

In the Marine Chart Division, we receive data from a variety of sources. Some examples include hydrographic survey data from our own Coast Survey ships, shoreline updates from the Remote Sensing Division of the National Geodetic Survey, updates to important aids to navigation, such as beacons and buoys, from the U.S. Coast Guard, and even place-name updates from the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. Our Nautical Data Branch processes all incoming data, and cartographers within regional production branches make the actual changes to the charts.

Cartographers within NOAA use sophisticated software and techniques to create nautical charts that meet certain standards, and many updates to these charts follow routine processes. However, every chart and dataset that needs to be incorporated into a chart can be a little bit different. Can you describe a situation where you would need to use your best judgment when creating or updating a chart?

“Use your cartographic judgement” is a favorite phrase within our workplace. It emphasizes the value of our individual experience and critical thinking in the charts we create. I find it helpful to put myself in the shoes of a mariner by asking myself, “How is this update to the chart going to help me get from Point A to Point B safely and efficiently?” For example, if I receive a survey with many soundings — or water depth measurements — and one of them falls right on top of an aid to navigation, like a beacon, I need to decide which feature is more important for the safety of navigation. In this case, even if the sounding is relatively shallower than the surrounding water, it’s important to keep the beacon since it serves such an important purpose for mariners.

What software and tools do you use to create and update nautical charts?

Most production cartographers in the Marine Chart Division spend their day working in ArcGIS Pro, using a mix of common tools as well as highly customized programs built by our developers. We also use other software programs to bring in new data and process it, as well as to check that updated chart files are accurate.

Are the skills required to update the paper nautical charts, which have been phased out by NOAA, different from the skills needed to update electronic charts? If so, how are they different?

Yes! I came on board at the tail end of paper chart production, so I was lucky to learn some of the old methods, as well as the newer electronic navigational chart, or ENC, production process. Each product, whether paper or electronic, required different software to create. When we were producing both paper and electronic charts, this essentially doubled the amount of work that was necessary to update a single nautical chart. Paper and electronic charts also represent two different aspects of cartography and GIS: raster, or pixel-based, data versus vector, or point, line, and polygon-based, data. Updating a paper chart required that the cartographer creating or updating it pay closer attention to how the product would look. They needed to consider how everything would look on a printed, physical chart laid out on a ship's table. A paper chart also required more labels, and features such as font sizes and line weights needed to be standardized. With ENCs, those aspects are automated. ENCs can also hold much more information than a paper chart, since users can click on features to learn more about them. Cartographers still have to consider how the ENC will look on a ship’s display, but they also have the ability to add greater detail to each feature, adding information like depth, the date the data was collected, the name of the object, and more.