Navigational charts: German and British hydrographical service cooperate

The Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency (BSH) and the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office (UKHO) will cooperate from October 2020 on the production, maintenance and distribution of nautical charts in A0 format for German waters. These nautical charts are mainly used by the commercial shipping industry, which is obliged to equip its vessels. The faster transmission and provision of corrections for international shipping will increase the safety and ease of navigation in the German sea area.

Due to this cooperation of the two authorities the BSH's nautical charts will reach a wider range of users than before, and both authorities will save resources due to the division of labour in production, corrections and distribution. The BSH will continue to be responsible for the chart content and its correction, while the UKHO will take over the printing and distribution of the charts and the publication of corrections. Until now, the two services have produced nautical charts for the same area independently of each other. As a result, corrections were first reported by the BSH as German Notice to Mariners, which were forwarded to the UKHO which then included them as corrections in their nautical charts. The cooperation of the services enables the direct and thus faster transmission of corrections.

Distribution and maintenance of the cooperation charts will begin on October 1 for initially five nautical charts. By the end of 2021, BSH and UKHO will extend the cooperation to all 15 nautical charts for the North Sea. To enable this, both parties coordinated the area coverage, nautical chart content, publication dates and also developed routines for correcting the nautical chart content.