Bahrain is an archipelago of over 33 islands and island groups, such as the Hawar Islands, with a total land area of 728km2. It is situated centrally on the southern shores of the Arabian Gulf, with the mainland of Saudi Arabia to the west and the peninsula of Qatar to the east, and has territorial waters of some 7,550km2, generally shallow and containing many coral reefs. The main port of Mina Salman lies south of the capital Al Manama. A large new port is under construction to bear the increasing number and tonnage of ships visiting the country. This port and many other massive construction projects currently underway at a rapid rate are mainly built on reclaimed land, most reclamation materials being dredged from the sea. This ‘phenomena’ has led to some of our charts needing updating whilst actually at the printer.

In 1992 Bahrain became a member of the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO). Since then, four of our eleven published charts have been included in the international chart scheme (INT) and accordingly adopted by UKHO, with which BHO signed a bilateral agreement in April 2000. Four of these charts have also been locally converted to ENC, so that in December 2004 Bahrain joined the International Centre for ENCs (IC ENC) for purposes of distributing three ENCs. It is planned to convert all the remaining charts into ENCs in the near future.

In March 2001 BHO signed another bilateral agreement with US Hycoop, under which two joint venture surveys took place in 2002 and 2004 using the 18m BHO survey catamaran Almasaha and US Hycoop multi-beam system. The surveys were concentrated on the main shipping channel and anchorage areas.

BHO predicts and publishes yearly tide tables for thirteen important tidal stations around the country. The tidal regime is quite complicated and this is mainly due to the nature of shallow water and coral reefs; tidal range varies from 0.3m to 2.7m over such a small area. A tidal stream atlas is also published and updated regularly.

All BHO data is in digital format and contained in a comprehensive in-house built S-57 compliant object database, and all objects are encoded according to the specifications in the S-57 manual. The DB is fully integrated with Caris GIS and Caris HIPS software, from which data can be extracted and used. A transformation program has been included so that data can be output in either the local Ain Al Abd or WGS 84 system. The data is exported in Caris batch-file format, which means that Caris feature codes are applied along with position, and the object will be presented in Caris as though entered manually. The link between the database and the Caris file is a unique ID for each entity in the database. This ID is also transferred via the batch-file.