Britain urges ships to prepare for life without reliable GPS

Eutelsat

 

From Splash by Sam Chalmers

Britain has warned shipowners that satellite navigation can no longer be taken for granted in some of the world’s busiest shipping regions, urging crews to practise navigating without GPS as jamming and spoofing become increasingly widespread.

In a new Marine Guidance Note, MGN 719, the UK’s Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) warns that interference across the Baltic, Black Sea, Middle East Gulf and parts of East Asia means satellite-derived positioning, navigation and timing information can no longer be relied upon everywhere.

The warning extends well beyond electronic charts.
The agency identifies a long list of potentially vulnerable equipment, including ECDIS, AIS, autopilots, dynamic positioning systems, radar, gyrocompasses and GMDSS communications equipment.
Ashore, vessel traffic services, pilotage systems, port management platforms and automated logistics systems are also exposed.

The financial implications are considerable.
Citing earlier UK government research, the MCA estimates that a seven-day GNSS outage could cost the British maritime economy £1.5bn ($2bn), including £1.3bn in port operations alone.

• 
  

Photo: ID 348035725 | Satellite Ships © Dragoscondrea | Dreamstime.com

 

The guidance urges operators to identify precisely which systems depend on satellite-derived data, establish procedures for detecting interference and regularly drill crews in alternative navigation methods.
Radar fixing, visual bearings, celestial navigation and dead reckoning are all recommended.

The notice follows growing evidence that satellite navigation interference is becoming a routine operational hazard rather than an occasional inconvenience in conflict zones.

Maritime intelligence firm Windward’s latest figures show an average of 5,131 GPS jamming incidents a day during the third quarter, with more than 124,000 individual vessels affected.

Research published earlier this year by the Royal Institute of Navigation found that 14% of survey respondents had experienced an unsafe or unlawful situation resulting from GNSS interference.

In July, SplashTech reported on a government questionnaire, believed to have originated in Britain, asking ship operators whether their crews had conducted GNSS-denial drills, understood the vulnerabilities of interconnected bridge equipment and could operate ECDIS in dead-reckoning mode.

More recently, SplashTech reported how four tankers in the Black Sea had apparently broadcast positions placing them in Lima, Peru, more than 12,000 km away.
Separate monitoring identified 1,702 impossible position jumps involving 379 vessels in the Gulf of Oman over a single week in September.

The UK is investing in a terrestrial navigation backup through its enhanced Loran, or eLoran, programme, but the MCA’s latest guidance makes clear that technological alternatives will take time to become widely available.

Britain’s planned eLoran network is not expected to provide an initial timing capability until 2028, with full positioning and navigation services targeted for 2030.

 

Links :

• Indexbox : UK MCA Warns Satellite Navigation Unreliable in Key Shipping Regions

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He reached the Americas centuries before Columbus. Why doesn’t he get more credit?

"Leiv Eiriksson Discovering America," by the Norwegian artist Christian Krohg, from the National Museum of Art in Oslo. 

A version of the painting by the artist's son, Per Krohg, hangs in the U.S.
Capitol. 

(Heritage Images/Getty Images)

From The Washington Post by By Matthew Hay Brown

Accounts of Leif Erikson’s voyage to present-day Canada were known to Europeans in Christopher Columbus’s time.


For the explorers from ice-covered Greenland, it must have seemed a paradise.
A genuinely green land of lush meadows irrigated by free-flowing rivers.
Whales and caribou to hunt, nesting birds and wild salmon to catch, grapes and wheat to gather.
A warmer climate, with more daylight and milder winters.

These Norsemen and women, led by the Viking Leif Erikson, built a year-round outpost believed to be a station for ship repair and staging ground for voyages farther south.
They fought and traded with Indigenous peoples.
At least one woman gave birth.

They named it Vinland.

Today, it’s called Newfoundland, in Atlantic Canada.
The Norse arrived in the year 1000, give or take a decade — half a millennium before a certain other European explorer first landed in the Bahamas.

So why, on Monday, does the United States observe Columbus Day?

‘Columbus had better PR’

Christopher Columbus, bearing sword and banner, claims the island known by its natives as Guanahani for Spain in this 1893 lithograph.
It's believed to be San Salvador in the present-day Bahamas.

(Library of Congress)

Christopher Columbus never set foot on the North American continent.
It wasn’t until after his death that Juan Ponce de León became the first European to reach what is now the United States.Ask The Post AIDive deeper

“Columbus had better PR,” says John Steinberg, an archeologist at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Much of what’s understood about the Norse presence in North America comes from the Vinland Sagas, a pair of 13th-century Icelandic works of genealogy, stories and navigational data that was uncorroborated until the discovery of Norse artifacts in Newfoundland in the 1960s.

Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the Americas in 1492, by contrast, was detailed by the contemporary writer Bartolomé de las Casas, a lawyer and Dominican friar working in part from Columbus’s own logs.

“The Vinland Sagas are stories told around a campfire,” Steinberg says.
“We have legends and archeology but no real history.
...
With Columbus, someone writes the story from his point of view.”

An Italian American heritage day

 

A Columbus Day parade in Wausau, Wisconsin, in 1892, 400 years after his voyage.

(Wisconsin Historical Society/Getty Images)

The Genoan navigator also benefited from a strong Italian American lobby, during a period when Italian immigrants to the United States were subjected to sometimes violent discrimination.

Columbus Day is first known to have been celebrated in New York on Oct. 12, 1792, the 300th anniversary of his landfall.
The first distinctly Italian American observance came in 1866.

In 1891, a mob in New Orleans lynched 11 Italian immigrants.
Italy severed diplomatic relations with the United States.
The following year, President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed Oct. 12 a national holiday.
Lobbying by the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal order, and prominent Italian Americans eventually led to its proclamation as a federal holiday in 1937 by President Franklin D.
Roosevelt.

In reaching the Americas, Columbus and those who followed him brought slavery, disease and death to the native population, and academics and activists in recent years have called for an end to the holiday.

In 1989, as the 500th anniversary of his first voyage approached, South Dakota, home to nine federally recognized tribes, replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day.

More than a dozen states and the District of Columbia have followed suit.
Joe Biden in 2021 became the first president to proclaim Indigenous Peoples’ Day, alongside Columbus Day.

President Donald Trump, whose administration has pushed to scrub federal institutions of what it calls “corrosive ideology” — including policies or programs recognizing historical oppression and racism — last year signed a presidential proclamation to recognize Columbus as “the original American hero.”

Trump last year proclaimed that he was “bringing Columbus Day back from the ashes,” though many places had never stopped celebrating it.

Corroborating the sagas

L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, where the remnants of a Norse settlement were found in 1960, is a Canadian National Historic Site and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

(Science Source)

For centuries, the Norse claim to have reached Americas rested on the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Erik the Red, sometimes contradictory works written some 250 years after the events they depict.

As history, the sagas can be problematic.
Alongside plausible descriptions of Viking life on land and at sea, they recount, for example, the time that the recently deceased Thorstein Erikson sits up to speak to his widow.
Also the mortal wounding of Thorvald Erikson by a one-legged creature, and the natives who elude Norse capture by vanishing.
(Leif, Thorstein and Thorvald were all sons of the explorer Erik the Red.)

But as navigational guides, historian Eleanor Barraclough says, the sagas are remarkably helpful.
“Part of it is the stuff you need to know to survive out in the world, which is directions and how to get across seas,” says Barraclough, author of “Beyond the Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas.” 

“And so that material is really quite neatly mapped.”

It was the sagas that pointed the Norwegian husband-and-wife team of explorer Helge Ingstad and archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad to L’Anse aux Meadows on the northern shore of Newfoundland, where in 1960 they discovered traces of a Norse settlement — the first evidence of European contact with the Americas before Columbus.

Found at the site were the remnants of eight sod-and-wood structures — three longhouses that could have housed scores of people, an iron forge and several workshops — identical to those the Vikings built in Iceland and Greenland, and artifacts including bone needles, iron nails, ship rivets and a bronze ring-headed cloak pin.

Researchers using carbon dating estimated the outpost to have been in use at some point between 990 and 1050.
In 2021, scientists at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands used a new method — counting tree rings from the radiocarbon signature left by a solar disturbance known to have occurred in 993 — to date three pieces of wood hewn there to 1021.

L’Anse aux Meadows is now a Canadian National Historic Site with artifacts, replica buildings and historical interpreters, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

What were Vikings doing in Newfoundland?

We don’t know, precisely, but we can theorize.
The Norse were known to have ranged as far south as the Mediterranean and as far east as Kievan Rus’, present-day Russia.
To build ships, they needed lumber, a commodity scarce in Iceland and Greenland.

According to the Saga of the Greenlanders, the Icelandic merchant Bjarni Herjólfsson, blown off course while attempting to reach Erik the Red’s settlement in Greenland, was the first Norseman to sight Vinland.
Leif Erikson, intrigued by Herjólfsson’s stories of a forested land, bought his ship and attempted to retrace his steps.

With a crew of 35, he found territory he called Helluland (Land of Flat Stones), believed to be present-day Baffin Island in the Canadian territory of Nunavut; Markland (Land of Forest), believed to be Labrador; and Vinland (Land of Wine).

The outpost at L’Anse aux Meadows might have been one in a network of sites used by the Norse throughout the year, as in Greenland and Iceland.
“They would have summer dairy stations, fishing stations,” Steinberg says.

The relatively modest accommodations, lack of burial sites and comparatively shallow midden pile — waste dump — all suggest that it was not intended as a permanent settlement.

“It’s an outpost,” Barraclough says.
“They’re using that place as a sort of springboard so they can spend their winters mending ships and then they can keep going further inland.”

Among the most compelling finds at the site are butternut shells.
Butternut trees don’t grow naturally in Newfoundland.
Their presence suggests that the Norse ventured farther south, perhaps to the Saint Lawrence River Valley or New Brunswick, or at least traded with people who did.

According to the sagas, the Norse had both friendly and violent encounters with Indigenous peoples.

A notable figure in the sagas is Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, the widow of Thorstein Erikson.
She is said to have remarried and given birth to a son, Snorri, believed to be the first child of European descent born on the North American mainland; attempted a conversation with an Indigenous woman; and, after converting to Christianity, made a pilgrimage to Rome.

It’s unclear how long the Norse remained in contact with Vinland.
Scientists conjecture sporadic visits over decades.
Barraclough notes a 14th-century report of a ship blown off course from Markland — Labrador — turning up in Iceland.

“And so even in the 1300s,” she says, “it seems quite plausible that there are at least foraging expeditions, because Greenland doesn’t have an awful lot of wood, and the Norse really do need wood for the type of lifestyle that they’re trying to keep going.”

The campaign for Leif Erikson Day

 

A statue of Erikson in Reykjavik, Iceland. 

(Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images)

As 19th-century Italian Americans began lobbying for Columbus Day, so Scandinavians sought recognition for Leif Erickson Day.
The movement was fueled by the 1874 publication of “America Not Discovered by Columbus” by Rasmus B. Anderson, a professor of Scandinavian studies at the University of Wisconsin and later a U.S. ambassador to Denmark.

Though overbroad in its claims — Anderson writes of Leif Erikson’s travel to present-day New England, for which no evidence has been found — the work helped to popularize the idea of the Norse “discovery” of the Americas.
In 1925, President Calvin Coolidge, speaking to a group of Norwegian Americans on the 100th anniversary of the arrival of Norwegian immigrants in New York Harbor, called Erikson the discoverer of America.

Soon, Wisconsin, Minnesota and the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, all home to substantial Scandinavian American populations, declared Leif Erikson days.
President Lyndon Johnson followed with a national holiday in 1964, proclaimed by every president since.
It’s celebrated today principally in the Upper Midwest.

As it was on Friday.
It falls each Oct. 9 — not a date from Erikson’s life, but the anniversary of the arrival of those 1825 immigrants.
And, conveniently, a few days before that other explorer’s day.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : 11 of History's most famous sea voyages / The Viking woman who sailed to America and walked .. / Image of the week : discovering America / Ancient documents suggest Italian sailors knew of America 150 ... / Colombus and the Piri Reis map of 1513
  

What about the nautical chart content?

 Figure 3: Very detailed bathymetric information on a Transit ENC (compilation scale 90,000) displayed on SEAiq Pilot. 

The area is also covered by ENCs at compilation scales 45,000 and 22,000. (Image courtesy: Shom)

 

From Hydro by Christian Mouden, SHOM

Why the transition to S-101 is a unique review opportunity

Hydrographic offices (HOs) are preparing their transition into the new S-100 era. 

This will require them to scheme different S-100 products that will be used in future ECDIS systems, set up the production, validation and distribution processes, train staff and so on.

The imminent transition from S-57 to S-101 offers a unique opportunity to review and optimize the content of nautical charts for modern navigation. 

This article focuses on the use of electronic navigational charts (ENCs) in ECDIS systems, while recognizing the increasing use of ENCs on electronic chart systems (ECS) for non-SOLAS navigation.

For the past 30 years or so, mariners have been using official S-57 ENCs on their ECDIS systems, supporting safety of life at sea (SOLAS).

The primary goal for HOs was to provide ENC coverage of the main maritime routes as quickly as possible.

That is why S-57 ENCs have almost always been produced by digitizing all the information on paper charts that formed national portfolios, with content dating back many decades or more.

While these ENCs were indeed new digital products, they were certainly not newly charted information (see Figure 1).

It was customary at the time to portray the maximum amount of information on the entire chart extent, and the content was designed with the sole purpose of being printed at certain scales and used accordingly by the mariner.

Obviously, it was not considered for use on an ECDIS. This ‘show all’ compilation method is defined as ‘full depiction’ in the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) S-4 standard.

Full depiction is applied on the largest-scale charts, with the aim of showing as much information as space permits.

Figure 1: Shom chart 6540 (published in 1970) and the equivalent ENC FR565400 displayed on SEAiq Pilot. (Image courtesy: Shom)

In reality, charted information (topographic features, bathymetric data, etc) varies considerably, not only from one HO to another but also over time within a single HO – and it can even depend on an individual cartographer’s interpretation.

The overall result can be very dense, with charts showing detail in areas where the mariner is not intended to navigate, or information of no benefit to navigation.

This often leads to ECDIS screen clutter. SCAMIN attribution, which is encoded on most of the ENC objects, is intended to optimize the display when the mariner zooms out by reducing clutter.

However, the current optional implementation by most HOs is not optimum and can certainly be improved.

The qualities of a good chart

In the case of the ENC specifically, being free of validation check errors (IHO S-58 standard) does not necessarily mean it is a high-quality product.

While S-58 validation checks ensure the digital product is consistent with the IHO ENC Product Specification, they do not consider the three basic qualities of a nautical chart:

1. It must be safe. 

This is the responsibility of the producing authority.

It is worth noting that safe does not mean, for instance, that the chart has been entirely compiled from recent surveys conducted with modern techniques.

Rather, it means that the overall charted features – including metadata on the quality of surveys (typically CATZOC attribute) or position accuracy attribute POSACC – provide the mariners with ad-hoc information so that they can appreciate the accuracy of the depth information in any area and adjust their routes and ECDIS look-ahead settings accordingly.

2. It must meet user requirements.

This means that the chart content is optimized with regard to the navigational purpose and the complexity of the area.

The chart content must also be adjusted depending on the possible existence of larger-scale charts in the area.

3. It must be easy to read. 

This quality is sometimes overlooked.

The best illustration of this is probably the density of soundings, which is often very high, even in areas with a relatively regular seabed with few significant shoals.

When displayed on the ECDIS, this makes it difficult to distinguish the objects that are most helpful for navigation.

The situation often becomes critical when text is displayed; then, screen clutter reaches saturation point.

It is important that HOs avoid producing unnecessarily crowded charts, recognizing that mariners often do not fully understand the technical content of the charts.

For example, S-4 standard includes some detailed charting rules that the mariner may be ignorant of. The recent merging of abbreviations for ‘Position Approximate’ and ‘Position Doubtful’ (PA/PD) offers a good example of how charts can be made easier to read for mariners. Keeping charts as simple as possible facilitates their task

 Less information also significantly reduces the number of features in the ECDIS pick report.

More generalization for more efficiency

Generalization is the cartographic process used to produce a smaller-scale chart from a larger-scale one. Nautical chart generalization principles are described in the S-4 standard, which provides basic guidance to cartographers on the levels of detail to be retained according to the navigational purpose of the chart.

S-4 also mentions that some vessels might not carry all the largest-scale charts and may be forced by unplanned circumstances (e.g. bad weather) to approach the coast or shelter using a smaller-scale chart.

For this reason, according to S-4, omission of details on smaller scales should be considered carefully. Although this is valid for paper chart navigation, the situation is different for SOLAS vessels that have the capacity to acquire ENCs on demand.

Apart from the full depiction provided on larger-scale charts and the generalization that should be applied on smaller-scale ones, the S-4 standard also allows the use of minimal depiction.

This is an extreme case of generalization that omits most features in an area, even though space is available to show some of them.

This process could be used more frequently on small-scale ENCs in specific areas such as estuaries or harbours.

On current charts, generalization is often minimal; many small-scale charts show detailed information, even in areas that are covered by larger scales.

Is there a need to show detailed information close to the shore on a ENC for transit navigation? Minimal depiction areas should be preferred in such cases (see Figure 4).

This would make charts easier to read and would also reduce the volume of the digital files.

S-101: a unique opportunity

The transition to S-101 is challenge for data providers as they will have to convert their existing S-57 data (or rather S-57 database, in some cases) to S-101.

Although this conversion will be an automated process executed using mapping files, it will require a careful initial review and consolidation of existing data to minimize both potential conversion issues and post-conversion edits of S-101 data.

This necessary preparation can be a huge task, but it is also a unique and perfect opportunity to review chart content so that it completely fits the actual needs of modern navigation.

Apart from the general chart content described above, HOs can also take advantage of this opportunity to review their national portfolios, such as by:

• optimizing the number of scales used
• reviewing the S-57 encoding to reduce the number of alarms on the ECDIS (this has been a constant complaint from mariners)
• encoding more depth contours than traditionally, especially in port areas where the seabed is not evolutive and where S-102 products (bathymetric surface) will not be necessary or available
• reviewing areas encoded with a CATZOC value ‘Unassessed’
• replacing qualitative accuracy attributes such as QUAPOS with quantitative attributes that can be used by the ECDIS look-ahead functionality

By reducing the number of features, optimized chart content will facilitate S-57 data conversion to S-101.

For HOs, this not only means a lighter workload for the conversion, validation and S-101 data post-conversion edits, but will also significantly reduce the necessary updates once the charts have been published.

Too heavy a task?

Hydrographic Offices may very well argue that the S-57 to S-101 conversion is already a challenge and that they do not have the resources to review their entire chart portfolio content.

This is only partly true.

Before changing the chart portfolio content, it will of course be necessary to define the new chart content.

Once these principles have been agreed, digital data and existing tools will allow a high level of automation.

It is possible to automate the reduction of sounding density, or remove specific features in selected areas, for instance. Ideally, this should be done before converting the data to S-101.

Nations with small ENC portfolios will be able to optimize their chart content ‘manually’.

Other producers can take advantage of existing tools to reduce the resources necessary to accomplish their chart modernization.

Conclusion

Although it may be out of scope for most hydrographic offices, they should at least consider rationalizing their nautical chart portfolio and content.

For HOs, this is a long-term investment to reduce their chart maintenance workload.

At this point in time, it is also a unique opportunity to ultimately better address mariners’ real-world challenges and provide them with all the data they need specifically and only the data they need, to ensure safe and easy navigation on their ECDIS or ECS.

There is no doubt they will be grateful when they experience the results.

The Atlantic’s near-record hurricane drought is about to end

Photograph : Joe Raedle/Getty Images

From Wired by Brian Kahn

Tropical Storm Isaias is set to become the basin’s first hurricane of the season, bringing life-threatening rain and storm surge to the Gulf Coast. 

THE 2026 ATLANTIC hurricane season has been mercifully dull, but that’s set to change this week.
Tropical Storm Isaias is forecast to become the season’s first hurricane before making landfall somewhere between Mississippi and Florida by the weekend.

El Niño has turned the Atlantic basin into a graveyard by changing winds high in the atmosphere so that they rip apart storms.
That’s helped depress tropical cyclone activity to near-record-low levels and resulted in zero hurricanes.
That could change imminently, though.

Latest first Atlantic hurricane in 121 years bears down on US Gulf coast

 

Isaias is churning in the Gulf of Mexico with winds of 65 mph, according to the latest update from the US National Hurricane Center.
That’s just a shade below hurricane strength.
The storm is forecast to pass over a patch of abnormally warm water, providing fuel for it to blossom into a hurricane.
It could peak as a Category 2 storm with winds of 110 mph as it lumbers to the northeast.
The storm is expected to weaken due to those aforementioned gnarly winds shortly before it makes landfall somewhere along the Gulf Coast.

The NHC has issued hurricane watches for all the coastline in Mississippi and Alabama as well as parts of the Florida Panhandle.
(Tropical storm watches extend into Louisiana as well.)

Folks in that region can expect rainfall totals of up to 7 inches, though some spots in the Panhandle could see as much as 10 inches and storm surge as high as 7 feet.
Tornadoes aren’t out of the question either.
In other words, it’s a storm to take seriously.

Isaias could make also (or at least tie) history as the latest first Atlantic hurricane to form on record.
The current record was set in 1905, when the season’s first hurricane formed on October 8.
There’s still one more update scheduled for Isaias on Wednesday, so it’s possible it could just miss out on tying that mark.

Record or not, Isaias is indicative of the hurricane season that wasn’t.
This year’s Atlantic hurricane season was forecast to be below average.
But it’s been even quieter than expected owing to an El Niño that’s been dubbed “super,” “Godzilla,” and “supersized.” The superlatives—which meteorologists will be quick to tell you are notofficial designations—are indicative of the strength of this year’s event.
El Niño is measured by ocean temperatures in a part of the tropical Pacific, and this year’s iteration has seen record highs throughout the summer and first part of fall.

The intensity has had a heavy hand in rearranging the atmosphere around the world, including over the Atlantic.
Saharan dust has also played a role in quieting things by making the air in one of the major areas where hurricanes develop too damn dry.

For a sense of how that has impacted the Atlantic hurricane season, we can look at some averages.
From 1991 to 2020, the basin saw an average of 14 named storms, seven hurricanes, and three major hurricanes—that is, storms of Category 3 or greater—annually, according to NHC data.
This year has seen eight tropical storms and one soon-to-be hurricane.

Another metric to measure the season is accumulated cyclone energy (ACE for short), which takes into account not just the number and intensity of storms but how long they stick around.
The ACE to date for 2026 is 10.8 units.
The average for this time of year?

Nearly 102, according to data maintained by Colorado State University.
Most of that energy typically accumulates from mid-August through late September.

None of this is to say there might not be another surprise storm in the coming weeks.
But with El Niño continuing to intensify and the peak of the season well past, the odds of this season seeing a sudden spurt of activity are minimal at best.

Links :

• Scientific America : Hurricane-isaias-just-set-a-new-record-for-atlantic-storms