Coastal Services Center

---

Digital NOAA Nautical Chart Reprojector

---

A stand-alone application has been developed to reproject digital NOAA nautical charts. This application is a companion to Chart Viewer which allows the display of BSB format nautical charts in ArcView®, ArcGIS® 8 and Imagine® 8. Because the standard chart projections are often not the most useful for coastal resource managers and other non-navigation uses, a separate application was developed to read a BSB format file, reproject it to the users specification, and output a new BSB or TIFF format file. Approximately 30 projections are available and the ability to change datum is included. The charts in BSB format (.kap files) are available from Maptech, Inc.

Downloading

Version 2.0 of the executable software is available for download for the Solaris, Windows, PC Linux, and Alpha Linux operating systems and includes a graphical user interface. Version 1.8.3 is still available for IRIX systems. The executable files are compressed into zip files for faster downloading (a free unzip program is available from info-zip). If your browser doesn't recognize the file as something to save to disk and tries to display it, manually chose "Save As" after it has downloaded. The version differences are available in the CHANGES file.

Please choose the desired platform to begin downloading the NOAA Nautical Chart Reprojector.

Windows | Solaris | sgi IRIX | Alpha Linux | PC Linux

Note: If for some reason the above download system fails, you will find the chart reprojector on our ftp site.

Installation and Use

For the Windows version, simply unzip the file and run the setup.exe program. If the program is started by clicking on its icon, the graphical user interface will appear. The program may also be run from the command prompt. If no arguments on the command line are given, the graphical user interface will appear, otherwise the text interface will appear. Using the command line with arguments, batch processing can be done.

For the Unix and Linux systems, unzip the download file and put the executable file somewhere in your PATH. You may want to rename the program to something a little more management for typing. UNIX users will need to make the file executable with the command
chmod +x programname
with the appropriate name for programname. To execute the program, the same instructions apply as for Windows above.

The output file will be in BSB or TIFF format, but with a the user-specified projection. The resulting chart may be read into ArcView 3.x, ArcGIS 8, or Imagine 8 using Chart Viewer created to read BSB format charts or by many software packages if a TIFF format is selected. TIFF output will also generate a world file with georeferencing information, but does not currently produce a GeoTIFF.

If you find this program useful, feel free to let us know and perhaps tell us what you use it for and any improvements you'd like to see. Send comments to csc@csc.noaa.gov with a subject of Chart Reprojector. Your feedback will help us justify the support of this program and future software tools.

Known Bugs and To Do List

• The output file does not show a change in the datum. If you overlay decimal degree data in ArcView, be sure to manually set the View Properties correctly. Note, however, that it is possible to reproject to a projection and/or datum not currently supported by ArcView.
• Write a Frequently Asked Questions document.
• Add more input projections by reading the expanded header lines for version 3 charts.

Other CRS Data and Tools

Return to Top