This is very informative. How are the vessels tracked? Is this real-time tracking of specifically equipped vessels. Can any other vessels be tracked or only those with traditional maritime transponders? If real-time, it'd be cool to have vessel/point data be displayed upon hovering over with a mouse.
Ships over a certain size are obligated to report their position (and some other information) over AIS (similar to ADSB on airplanes. It's meant for other nearby ships and ports for navigational purposes. These are tracked from shore based scanners, scanners on ships and satellites. You can see partly real-time data on marinetraffic.com and vesselfinder.com
Shipmap.org
121–129 of 129 posts
Re: Shipmap.org
#122This is weirdly beautiful, like the maps of undersea internet cables that frequently come up here as well. You can clearly see: 1) oil flowing out of the Persian Gulf from the Middle East to China 2) ships waiting to get through the Panama and Suez Canals 3) why people talk about “shipping lanes”. There are some obvious tracks everyone follows, because it’s the cheapest way from A to B (e.g. cape of good hope to stra…
Until you notice the carbon emissions on the top left.
Re: Shipmap.org
#123This is weirdly beautiful, like the maps of undersea internet cables that frequently come up here as well. You can clearly see: 1) oil flowing out of the Persian Gulf from the Middle East to China 2) ships waiting to get through the Panama and Suez Canals 3) why people talk about “shipping lanes”. There are some obvious tracks everyone follows, because it’s the cheapest way from A to B (e.g. cape of good hope to stra…
> This is weirdly beautiful Until you notice the carbon emissions on the top left.
Re: Shipmap.org
#124Re: Shipmap.org
#125Re: Shipmap.org
#126I wonder what influences the decision for some ships to take that direct route between Hokkaido and Vancouver through the Aleutian islands while others veer South on no apparent lane. Maybe vessels lacking sophisticated enough navigation equipment to navigate through the islands?
Not a captain, but I'd guess it has to do with the seasonal wind direction and strength variations. The North Pacific gets pretty wild in winter. Here's a visualization: https://www.deepzoom.com/s/20260107-r4y6xdifH4
Re: Shipmap.org
#127Great visualization. IMO 2020 regulation unintentionally contributed to global warming while reducing air pollution. This rule drastically cut the amount of sulfur permitted in ship fuel, which improved public health but reduced the reflective effect of atmospheric aerosols that had been masking some global warming. You'd think the people making the rules would try and look at all the impacts.
The cooling effect of SO2 was certainly known when the IMO regulations were decided upon. It was decided that the public health advantages outweighed the climate warming. One can certainly quibble whether this decision was correct or not, but it wasn't done in ignorance. (My take would have been be to allow high sulphur fuel out on the high seas, where there's very few humans around (or flora and fauna in general). )
Re: Shipmap.org
#128This is pretty amazing to watch! I did just watch a dot go through the Great Lakes, to Chicago, then take to the air and make a bee line straight to the Gulf of Mexico. Probably some weird artifact but made me chuckle.
That could be malfunctioning hardware, turned off AIS, or a gap in recording. Smaller deviations from a line are most likely GPS jitter. AIS is transmitted over VHF. Terrestrial stations listen for the transmitted AIS messages to record them for public consumption. Source: I collect AIS data over TCP/IP directly from my orgs ships.
Re: Shipmap.org
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
That could be malfunctioning hardware, turned off AIS, or a gap in recording. Smaller deviations from a line are most likely GPS jitter. AIS is transmitted over VHF. Terrestrial stations listen for the transmitted AIS messages to record them for public consumption. Source: I collect AIS data over TCP/IP directly from my orgs ships.
Any details on your AIS setup, or links to a similar configuration?
AIS is connected to a serial-to-ethernet converter. That allows me to get the AIS stream over TCP/IP. I wrote an application to consume AIS and do what they wanted with it.
The serial-to-ethernet converters are the magic ingredient. It allowed us to have tracking and telemetry regardless of terrestrial VHF stations in the area. The original setup also provided a feed from Transas but we stopped using it. We also use a private AIS VHF recorder as a backup source of AIS messages. We used that a lot more before Starlink due to terrestrial blockage of VSAT links. The backup source was a good compliment to the primary. They had the most infra in areas that were blocked most often.