As some of you know, our friends at Survice and Cruisernet have been working with a growing fleet of volunteer boaters to collect soundings data from their depth finders. Now, there’s enough data now to show the real promise of crowd sourcing using low-cost hardware and software leveraging on-board depth finders. Below are two screen shoots showing color-coded soundings data in an an inlet at two different zoom levels. One of the first applications that come to mind is the establishment of “bread-crumb” trails in various shallow and narrow waterways. In general, we think this could be a really useful way to compliment conventional, certified soundings data from the USCG as well as User Generated Content navigational data.
Enjoy (and send us your thoughts!),
-The EarthNC Team
PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 9, 2012
Salty Southeast Cruisers Net, SURVICE Engineering and EarthNC Form Partnership to Bring Crowd-Sourced Sounding Data to the Cruising Community.
Delray Beach, FL – The Salty Southeast Cruisers’ Net (SSECN), SURVICE Engineering, and EarthNC, Inc. announced today an exciting new partnership that will provide SSECN users with the benefit of 25 million soundings acquired and processed with the ARGUS (Autonomous Remote Global Underwater Surveillance) system. The Salty Southeast Cruisers’ Net (http://www.CruisersNet.net) is the FIRST web site to offer easy access to ARGUS data.
Effective immediately, users of the SSECN’s “Chart View” pages can click a simple checkbox, thereby opening a new ARGUS layer, set over up-to-date images of the NOAA nautical charts. Once selected, the ARGUS layer will display color coded markers which depict the tide corrected solution of soundings gathered by ARGUS cooperative research vessels. This new SSECN tool will be continuously updated as new ARGUS data is received. It will provide the Southeastern USA cruising community with yet another valuable resource to help make mariner’s time on the water a safer and more enjoyable experience.
SSECN has worked closely with ARGUS and EarthNC to integrate ARGUS data into the SSECN’s EarthNC powered “Chart View” pages. Plans are also underway to include ARGUS’s sounding data as a layer in EarthNC’s Marine Charts & Weather iPhone app in a future update.
Salty Southeast Cruisers’ Net co-founder and Editorial Director, Claiborne S. Young, comments:
“We could not have brought this new, exciting resource to the cruising community without the tireless work and cooperation of EarthNC and SURVICE Engineering. The sole impetus for all three of our companies was to make the valuable data gathered by the ARGUS project available to the cruising community in a simple, easy to use and understand format. Working together, we believe that goal has been achieved!”
John Hersey, ARGUS Project Manager, adds: “SSECN readers are the ideal audience for ARGUS solutions, and we’re very excited about this opportunity to provide added value for under-surveyed waterways such as the ICW to those who can most benefit from it. The partnership’s combined expertise will add to the continued development of outputs that will endlessly improve the benefit for recreational boaters. We also look forward to input from SSECN readers in the form of soundings, feedback, and local knowledge to make the solutions even better.”
EarthNC’s Zetterlind adds: “The ARGUS soundings data, supported by SSECN, is an important and innovative approach to crowd-sourced surveying data that compliments traditional navigational data sources. It has huge potential for our customers and is a natural fit for both our web-based and mobile offerings.”
