TCarta to Deliver Satellite Derived Bathymetry for 13 Regions to National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
TCarta Marine, a global provider of hydrospatial products and services, has been awarded a contract to deliver satellite derived bathymetry (SDB) and seafloor classification data for the coastal zones of 13 regions around the world to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) under contract to Maxar Technologies.
TCarta will deliver seabed depth and feature maps from high-resolution multispectral Maxar WorldView-2 and WorldView-3 satellite imagery for the 13 regions. SDB measurements are accurate to depths of 20-30 meters depending on water conditions, with two-meter spatial resolution. Feature classification includes coral reefs, large rocks, sandbars, and other navigation hazards.
TCarta has processed thousands of Maxar satellite images for the project, including hundreds of high-resolution scenes for one nation alone. By the time all deliverables have been submitted and approved by NGA, TCarta will have mapped the entire subsurface coastlines of the 13 regions over the 12-month Period of Performance.
“This is the most ambitious SDB mapping program ever conducted in terms of both geographic area and timeline,” said TCarta President Kyle Goodrich. “In particular, one 7,239-square-kilometer coastline by itself is larger than any contiguous SDB project TCarta has undertaken.”
“SDB can be particularly useful for remote or hard-to-access locations and for areas where traditional survey methods are too expensive or time consuming,” said Jennifer Krischer, Maxar’s Vice President and General Manager, Intelligence Programs. “The partnership between Maxar and TCarta offers a valuable service to NGA for accurate and efficient bathymetric data collection, which reflects NGA’s renewed emphasis on collecting data and generating insight ‘from Seabed to Space’.”
A leader in the application of SDB technology worldwide for more than a decade, TCarta has played a key role in enhancing the traditional water depth extraction methodology. With funding from Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) programs managed by NOAA and the National Science Foundation, the Denver firm has integrated machine learning algorithms into the processing workflow and introduced the use of space-based laser data from the NASA ICESat-2 satellite to validate SDB results.
“A major challenge with this project was the variety of turbid and silty water conditions encountered in different geographic regions, but NGA has been receptive about the results,” said Goodrich. “We have bolstered and refined our existing workflows to deliver products that meet NGA requirements.”
About TCarta (www.tcarta.com)
With offices in the United States, Jamaica, and Canada, TCarta has built an international business on cost-effectively and safely deriving onshore and offshore data sets using multispectral imagery captured by Earth observation satellites – without negative impact on the natural habitat. TCarta products and services are relied upon by governmental, insurance, oil & gas, environmental, and infrastructure development clients in applications as diverse as natural resource monitoring, tsunami modeling, disaster & hazard response, and hydrologic studies.
The TCarta product lines include high-resolution satellite-derived water depth and seafloor map products as well as 90- and 30-meter GIS-ready bathymetric data aggregated from numerous information sources. TCarta has also recently unveiled the use of ICESat-2 LiDAR data sets for use in SDB validation, and the TCarta Global Satellite Derived Bathymetry (G-SDB) off-the-shelf products. G-SDB is generated with Machine Learning and ICESat-2 laser data at 10m resolution to depths of 30m depending on water clarity.
