To ECDIS manufacters and shareholders
             
Ice Charts in ECDIS
             
To whom it may concern,

In order to promote the use of ice information on ships, specially on ECDIS 
within the framework of E-Navigation, the BSH will start the operational 
production of freely available ice charts of the Baltic in formats suitable 
for ECDIS in the winter season 2012/2013. Within the international collaboration 
of the ice services (IICWG, ETSI) we hope that in the course of next year 
similar products will also be available for other regions of the world. 

For the security of marine shipping it would be advantageous, that these 
charts could be displayed on most ECDIS, and in the near future also your 
customer could have the need to incorporate the ice charts into their ECDIS. 
You could help us on this goal in two ways:

1)try to incorporate the S-57 test data we are making available in your 
ECDIS products and tell us about your experiences.
2)Work with us and JCOMM Expert team on sea ice (ETSI) in the development 
of an IHO S-100 compliant ice product specification     

The test ice charts are based on IHO S-57 Standard and are available at 
ftp://ftp.bsh.de/outgoing/m12/ECDIS/. The production process allows generating 
of two kinds of ice data:
1.Additional Military Layers (ESB 2.1)  and 
2.Ice Marine Information Overlays
Both are vector data based on IHO S-57 Standard, information and test data 
are found in the respective sub-folders AML, respective IceMIO. As at the moment 
we can visualizate the IceMIO only with Caris software (Caris S-57 Composer or 
with free viewer Caris Easy View), we included  also the needed additional files. 

Our own first very rough draft for an  IHO S-100 compliant ice product specification 
can be found in the sub-folder S-100 ICE. We are working steadily on this draft and 
hope to have a more complete version ready in August, so it can also be discussed on 
the IHO ECDIS Stakeholders Forum in September as well as at the IICWG Meeting in 
October.  

For further questions or to inform us about your ideas and needs regarding ice 
information in ECDIS please contact us:
Alexander Benke:	+49 381 4563-655	Alexander.Benke@bsh.de
Dr. Jürgen Holfort:	+49 381 4563-782	Juergen.Holfort@bsh.de

Best Regards


		Dr. Jürgen Holfort
		Head of the German Ice service,
		and member of ETSI and IICWG.