Hydro International Columns

Looking at the current hydrographic market, an interesting aspect is the continuous search for hydrographic personnel. However, while quite a few of the current hydrographic surveyors obtained their t...

“It wasn’t always easy being a black woman in my early days as an oceanographer,” says Dawn Wright, chief scientist at a worldwide operating company specialized in mapping and spatial analytics ...

Just recently someone reminded me about the 20th anniversary of the finalization of the first official type-approval of an ECDIS device. Indeed, it was in summer 1999 that all sea trials and technical...

On 20 February this year, the Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 project became operational. Its task: to finish mapping the 84% of our oceans still unmapped. Simultaneously an 18-page concept paper�...

When looking at the classic work of Hydrographic Offices (HOs), the most prominent outputs had been navigational charts – either printed or as ENCs – and other products for navigators, like public...

Having served in the IHO Secretariat for ten years, Robert Ward recently handed over the Secretary-General  baton to his long-standing friend and colleague Dr Mathias Jonas. In this column, he looks...

The evolution of hydrographic surveying technology has been moving at a very fast pace over the last decade. The introduction of unmanned systems such as autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), unmanne...

In June 2016, the IHO/IOC GEBCO Guiding Committee and the Nippon Foundation hosted F-FOFM, the Forum for Future Ocean Floor Mapping in Monaco. Over three days, some 170 ocean mapping stakeholders were...

In his column in 'Hydro International', Mark Sinclair from Fugro writes that he commends the ‘Technology in Focus: Bathymetric Lidar’ article; it is right on the money. Amongst other things, it...

For most of my naval career, senior colleagues bemoaned the curse of sea blindness, a perception that increased in volume around the time of government reviews of defence and the inevitable scrutiny o...

The hydrographic world gathered in Rostock-Warnemünde for the Hydro 2016 event from 8 to 10 November. The German Hydrographic Society DHyG hosted this event for the second time at this location right...

With one year left as President (name soon to become Secretary-General) of the IHO, it seems like a good time to consider where I think the world’s national Hydrographic Offices (HOs) need to go nex...

I became director of NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey in late August, and I feel incredibly lucky to be able to take the helm at this dynamic time in hydrographic history. We are on the cusp of a new e...

Three years ago we discussed the global proliferation of large coastal hydrographic charting-based projects. More recently the topic was large, multi-month MBES applications on a variety of regional s...

Research vessels are a huge investment. They are developed to meet current standards and even move the bar as they are also a national showcase of science and technology. The United Kingdom has been d...