An official website of the United States government.
Here's how you know we're official.
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
A small lock or https:// means you’ve safely connected to a .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.
As the history of U.S. nautical chart-making progresses, it becomes closely tied to the history of hydrographic surveying. Hydrographic surveying is the science of measuring and describing the physical properties of the ocean and aspects of the land areas bordering it.
In the 1930s, single-beam echo sounders, which use sound waves to determine the water’s depth directly beneath a ship to the sea floor, were introduced to the field of hydrographic surveying.
A decade later, U.S. involvement in World War II (1941-1945) placed unprecedented demands on the Coast and Geodetic Survey office, and during that period, nautical chart production increased tenfold.
In the 1950s, technological advancements made during World War II, such as the development of positioning systems, helped the office meet the need for more accurate and rapid collection of hydrographic survey data. This need was spurred by an increased interest in ocean exploration and an awareness of ocean resources’ value.
At that point, the office’s ability to use the hydrographic survey data lagged far behind its ability to collect the data, since the recording, processing, and plotting of survey data was still performed manually. In the 1960s, the office developed a computer-assisted system for processing the huge amounts of data hydrographic survey teams collected.
This work led to the Hydroplot system, a milestone in the history of hydrography and cartography, and the first fully automated system used by NOAA teams for both acquiring and processing data. The system was first installed aboard the hydrographic survey vessel Whiting in 1967.
The image on the top left shows a Hydroplot system installed and running on a NOAA ship, while the bottom left image shows a close-up of the Hydroplot controller. The image on the right contains an excerpt from a 1981 manual on the Hydroplot system.
In 1970, the office became a part of the NOAA National Ocean Service, and it was split into the Office of Coast Survey, which retained the mission of nautical chart-making, and the National Geodetic Survey, which was dedicated to geodesy.
While the Hydroplot system was state-of-the-art technology in the 1970s, it quickly grew obsolete in the 1980s because it required paper punch tape, a method for storing data that includes punched holes in a continuous roll of tape. The rate of collecting data for this system also resulted in significant gaps, leaving teams to infer what was in the spaces where they had no data. The introduction of more powerful computer workstations was the fatal blow to the Hydroplot system.
Social