Canadian Summer Internship Program Trains Hydrographers of the Future
By Kevin P. Corbley
Three marine organizations teamed in the summers of 2023 and 2024 to prepare Canadian ocean mapping students to become “Hydrographers of the Future.” The first-of-its-kind internship program focused on equipping the students with the technical skills and knowledge that are increasingly required in the hydrography profession but are not yet taught in many college programs because they are so new and evolving at such a rapid pace.
“The Hydrographer of the Future must still understand traditional marine science and ocean survey practices, but in addition they will need training in automated marine and airborne sensor systems, satellite-based Earth observation platforms, and artificial intelligence applications,” said Kyle Goodrich, President of TCarta Marine, the Colorado firm that spearheaded the program.
Six undergraduate and two graduate students participated in the 2023 summer-long paid internship co-sponsored by, and held at, the Marine Institute (MI) of Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland. All eight students were enrolled in the MI Ocean Mapping program. Mobilization of the program was shared among TCarta, Memorial University, and The Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project, which seeks to inspire the complete mapping of the entire seafloor by 2030.
Six more MI students took part in the 2024 summer program, and another half dozen are already committed for the 2025 internship.
“Field work will remain a key part of hydrography, but hydrographers will also have to be data scientists,” said Paul Elliott, Academic Director and Instructor in the MI Master of Applied Ocean Technology program. “There is so much data being collected from many different technologies, and hydrographers must know what to do with it.”
Another objective of the internship was to make hydrography more attractive as an academic pursuit and profession at a time when the need for trained ocean mappers is expanding. This demand is being driven by increased offshore hydrocarbon exploration, renewable energy siting, and coastal development that all require detailed seafloor mapping.
The reactions from the students at the completion of the hands-on course were overwhelmingly positive. Each had a slightly different experience, but the most common takeaways were excitement over acquiring additional employable skills, surprise at discovering new facets of the hydrography profession, and enthusiasm for playing a part in the Seabed 2030 initiative.
“I’ve definitely learned skills that I otherwise wouldn’t have learned in the classroom,” said Kaitlin Power, a graduate of the MI Ocean Mapping program.
The internship delivered these experiences in a real-world work environment. Spending eight-hour days in the MI computer laboratory, the students received traditional instruction from TCarta personnel followed by intensive collaborative work on seafloor mapping projects. Some data sets were delivered to TCarta customers as commercial products while others were provided to Seabed 2030 for inclusion in the global GEBCO grid.
Instruction in Integrated Technologies
The curriculum focuses on training the students in the application of Satellite Derived Bathymetry (SDB), a technique that derives seafloor depth in shallow water, usually in coastal zones, through analysis of multispectral satellite imagery. SDB serves as an ideal instructional tool because it integrates multiple state-of-the-art technologies, many new to hydrography.
“SDB fills the gap in shallow-water data collection where it’s too risky to operate traditional bathymetric survey technology,” said Elliott.
Dating from the days of the U.S. Landsat mission in the 1970s, SDB is a less expensive and safer method of measuring bathymetry in the near-shore environment than traditional shipborne, or even airborne, techniques. SDB achieved mainstream status in 2020 when the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.K. Hydrographic Office adopted the technology as an official hydrographic survey method. Numerous international ocean mapping agencies followed. In 2021, Seabed 2030 specifically requested SDB data as a cost-effective technique for near-shore mapping.
Over the past decades, the quality of SDB mapping increased as spatial resolution of satellites improved, however, the core processing algorithms remained the same. It was widely agreed the technology needed an overhaul. TCarta applied for funding from NOAA and National Science Foundation to upgrade the entire SDB workflow with state-of-the-art processing capabilities and expand its applicability to deeper, murkier waters, especially in Arctic regions.
Through the SDB training interns are introduced to dozens of new technologies and skills, some that are outside of the typical course curricula for most hydrography students. Although technologies such as satellite imaging and artificial intelligence may be unique to the SDB workflow for now, TCarta is confident they will soon be integrated into other ocean mapping methodologies.
Key capabilities taught during the summer include the following:
Students are introduced to the variety of satellite imagery available for SDB and studied the strengths of each for certain project types. For example, no-cost coarse resolution ESA Sentinel-2 A/B satellite data was used for broad geographic coverage, while high-resolution Maxar WorldView imagery was processed for targeted, site-specific applications in the course.
TCarta instructs the interns on how to utilize a pre-processing tool to prepare in-situ data from SONAR or LiDAR as calibration data sets for processing the satellite images.
The interns learn how to apply an enhanced version of a traditional Band Ratio algorithm along with a newly devised Machine Learning random forest algorithm in iterative processes to derive water depth measurements from individual image pixels.
Students receive instruction on harnessing the power of cloud computing to apply the SDB algorithms to stacks of multi-temporal Sentinel images acquired for the same location at dozens of different times.
The interns use an Artificial Intelligence-based QA/QC tool to apply LiDAR data from the NASA ICESat-2 satellite to evaluate and validate the SDB outputs.
PFMABE 3D point cloud software developed by the U.S. government is employed to edit hydrographic data sets to produce final deliverables.
“In a short period of time, I acquired skills to collaborate with a team, generating satellite-derived bathymetry for a variety of locations around the world. This introduced me to the vast capabilities of remote sensing and sparked my interest in this field. This internship was a unique and enriching experience that has provided me with invaluable insight and skills I will carry forward in both my career and academic studies,” said Bianca Barrett of Toronto, a 2024 participant and 2025 graduate of Applied Ocean Technology Graduate Program.
Creating Real World Products
For Will Edwards, an MI Ocean Mapping student, part of the 2023 internship’s excitement was working on SDB products that would be deliverables for real end users, especially the Seabed 2030 endeavor which is considered the highest profile seafloor mapping project in the world right now.
“I am really happy to get the opportunity to provide data to Seabed 2030…I had been waiting a few years to do that,” said Edwards. “I’m glad the data [we produced] was accurate enough to be used.”
“The SDB data sets provided by the students of the summer internship are instrumental in supporting the global effort underway to deliver a complete map of the ocean floor by 2030,” said Seabed 2030 Project Director Jamie McMichael-Phillips. “We are delighted to support this collaborative internship co-sponsored with our partners Memorial University and TCarta enabling students to acquire cutting-edge hydrospatial skillsets and equipping them for their future careers as modern hydrographers.”
In total, the 2023 interns created more than 21,125 square kilometers and 2024 interns more than 39,000 square kilometers of SDB coastal products during the 12-week session. Key data sets included:
- Entire Newfoundland coastline and three Arctic regions for Marine Institute research,
- Timor Island in Asia and New Hanover Island in Papua New Guinea for Seabed 2030,
- Somalia, the Mosquito Coast, the Galapagos and the islands of the Lesser Antilles for Seabed 2030,
- Entire Madagascar coastline off the coast of Africa for a TCarta client.
“The students took what they learned in the classroom and applied it to real projects with actual data and deadlines. They learned what they have to do to get a project completed,” said Elliott. “They know what will be expected from them when they join the workforce.”
Arik Headley of Barbados, a 2024 intern and undergraduate student of Ocean Mapping, agrees: “The opportunity to intern at TCarta Marine was a valuable knowledge and skill-building experience within the remote sensing industry. The internship challenged me to improve my critical thinking skills and allowed me to increase my geospatial knowledge. It was a wonderful experience, and I would gladly do it again.”
MI’s success at educating hydrography students has put it at the top of ocean mapping programs worldwide. The Master’s Program has been recognized by the International Hydrographic Organization as one of the few to receive the S-5A standard of competence.
Success and What’s Next
The internship program succeeded on many levels. Among the most important was resetting the students’ expectations of what a future career in hydrography might look like.
MI Hydrography Instructor, Olga Telecka, explained: “Hydrography has traditionally been a profession in which most data collection work was conducted on a ship. For many, the prospect of spending weeks or months on a boat away eliminated hydrography as a professional choice. But now that so much data is being collected remotely and with data analysis being performed in onshore labs, the profession offers opportunities for both maritime enthusiasts and land lovers.
“What [the students] learned in the internship is that hydrographers don’t necessarily need to go on a vessel to have a career in this industry, which for some is very important,” said Telecka. “This program opens the horizon.”
Telecka added that for the Marine Institute, the course reinforced the value of academic-industry partnership. Working professionals can expose students to cutting edge technologies already being used in the commercial world before they find their way into textbooks. Based on the positive experience with TCarta, the Maritime Institute is considering other technologies to feature in future internships.
TCarta is working closely with MI to refine the SDB program and sponsor it again in summer 2025
“The program showed us that a non-distracted group of new-to-SDB people could take a new technology in a short time period and produce solid, professional work – as students,” said TCarta’s Goodrich. “The students performed better than we anticipated, impressing us with their eagerness and interest in improving the new processes they were learning.”
The internship organizers hope the internship format will be a template used by other academic programs and private sector companies to introduce hydrography students to the latest technologies, helping them understand the full breadth of the profession and making it more appealing in the process.
While the internship succeeded in preparing students to become Hydrographers of the Future, Goodrich noted, the hydrography industry as a whole still has much work to do in attracting more students to the discipline. He challenges private sector colleagues and academics to do more in promoting hydrography and ocean mapping to young people long before they reach university.
For universities, the key is collaboration. MI’s Elliott recommended that academic institutions look for partners in the commercial world they can partner with as his did with TCarta to help make the transition into the working world easier for the students.
About the Author
Kevin Corbley is a business development consultant with more than 30 years of experience in the geospatial profession. He is based in Colorado, USA.
This article was previously published in Hydro International
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