The National Bathymetric Source

Bathymetric data are foundational for many important marine and coastal uses such as increasing the safety of navigation through updated high-resolution nautical charts and services, studying the changing of coastline features in response to climate change, creating hydrodynamic models for coastal resilience efforts, and studying marine life, among others. NOAA's Office of Coast Survey's National Bathymetric Source (NBS) program curates and regularly maintains a bathymetric data compilation for navigation, planning, and public needs. The traditional manual workflow of various disparate sources applied to a navigation product has been reimagined by leveraging automation in compiling sources using hydrographic quality metrics to determine the best available data for any geographic area. All bathymetric data sources acquired must be evaluated for depth, quality, and source information to make NBS data-driven workflows effective. The originating metadata informs the normalization of format, coordinate reference system, coverage, and quality assessment to prepare each source for compilation. The quality metrics used during the compilation phase to determine the best available bathymetry are carried through to the extracted products to inform effective use. The extracted bathymetry is prepared for navigation, planning, and public pipelines in customer-specific format, coordinate reference system, and resolution. All phases of the NBS workflow are discussed, from acquiring source through extracting bathymetry. The NBS program is driven to support the United States' bathymetry needs with timely, curated, and accessible bathymetric data.