Live ships map

http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/

by jan-hocevar • 14 years ago

257 51 14 years ago

nalidixic• 14 years ago

Extremely cool!

ggchappell• 14 years ago

Very nice, but I had to wonder why, of the thousands of ships whose positions are recorded, only 2 appear to be any significant distance from land. The answer is in the FAQ [1]:

> The MarineTraffic system does not cover all the seas of the world, but only specific coastal areas where a land-based AIS receiver is installed.

[1] http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/faq.aspx?level1=160#16

bcl2• 14 years ago

The AIS transmissions are VHF (162MHz) so they are fairly short range, although with high gain antennas you can extend it a bit (with a corner reflector I once had intermittent data from a ship 600nm away).

pixie_• 14 years ago

There's a commercial service that offers global coverage with AIS receivers attached to satellites. http://www.orbcomm.com/services-ais.htm

b_emery3• 14 years ago

I'm actually serving data to marinetraffic.com from a receiver near Point Conception, California. The AIS broadcasts in the VHF band so it's basically line of site, plus a bit more because of various scattering effects. We have a receiver on Santa Cruz Island at about 750 ft elevation that gets AIS signals from ships off Mexico (when the conditions are right) - way beyond the quoted range.

The amount of shipping along even our small section of coast boggles the mind. There's a seasonal signal to it also. See [1] for example.

[1] http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2011/10/la-port-traffic-in...

toomuchtodo2• 14 years ago

This makes me want to buy a bunch of AIS receivers and take a week or two off to travel to far flung locations to setup remote receiving locations.

Nerd level: Extreme

Bonus points that you cite Calculated Risk blog.

b_emery3• 14 years ago

This makes me want to buy a bunch of AIS receivers and take a week or two off to travel to far flung locations to setup remote receiving locations.

We've been putting them at our HF radar sites to log ship data, so that we can use the ship data in a hack to get the radars to self calibrate. The radars measure ocean currents and are in some pretty 'far flung locations'. Yes it's fun!

ruethewhirled2• 14 years ago

This is very cool. Great tool for Somalian pirates too?

edit. Ahh never mind they don't seem to have any data on the east coast of Africa

TamDenholm• 14 years ago

Was just thinking this, the new tool for pirates has got to be a laptop with this site open.

josephjrobison• 14 years ago

Maybe everyone's too scared to take a boat of the coast of Somalia?

Also notice the ridiculous amount of ships of of Iran's coast!

eCa• 14 years ago

Those are mostly oil tankers. Since 20% of the world's oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz [1], the Iranians threat of closing that passage has petroleum prices recently. More analysis at The Oil Drum [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Hormuz

[2] http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8956

blantonl2• 14 years ago

They don't have any data for the east coast of Africa because there probably aren't any receivers setup to receive AIS signals in that area.

ruethewhirled2• 14 years ago

Yeah after reading the FAQ I came to the same conclusion. But also realized that pirates wouldn't actually need this site and could just get their own AIS receiver's

cpeterso• 14 years ago

I see business opportunities for marinetraffic.com to offer higher resolution/precision maps to paying customer. ;)

apaprocki2• 14 years ago

I just checked on the Bloomberg, and we have data for ships off of Somalia.. so it definitely exists:

http://imgur.com/fZslp

xelfer• 14 years ago

This is great, I live near one of the biggest ports in Australia. Great to be able to identify the ships I can see from my house.

artursapek• 14 years ago

Wow. Notice the complete lack of anything around North Korea.

TazeTSchnitzel2• 14 years ago

No AIS radio volunteers there :P

nowarninglabel• 14 years ago

Lack of data, due to lack of AIS receivers, not lack of shipping activity.

gacba• 14 years ago

Cool! FlightAware for boat traffic.

feverishaaron• 14 years ago

There are a lot of tankers sitting off the coasts. I wonder if they are holding oil that was delivered to speculators, awaiting sale?

ahelwer• 14 years ago

Here is a basic summary of the economic sense behind floating storage:

http://oil-price.net/en/articles/the-case-for-floating-oil-s...

protomyth• 14 years ago

Some places have things like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Offshore_Oil_Port that means the tanker doesn't have to come to a traditional port.

twelvechairs2• 14 years ago

Often tankers sit out and wait for the oil price to change marginally (yes, really - its that silly). Other than that, could be many reasons including bunkering (via smaller ships), full port, repairs/servicing, etc.

philwelch• 14 years ago

It's not that silly when you work it out. You have a ship holding 2-3 million barrels of oil and a 20-40 crew. It looks like the market price of light sweet crude varies by as much as $1 per barrel per day. Which means a difference of 2-3 million dollars if you come to port today instead of yesterday.

blantonl2• 14 years ago

For those that are not aware, this is crowd sourced aggregation of data received by AIS (Automatic Identification System) VHF receivers which are hosted by volunteers who put up a receiver, antenna, and send the data received from the ships to this site.

entropie• 14 years ago

And now i want some crewmen wi' long beards an' a frigate... ARRRRL

TazeTSchnitzel2• 14 years ago

I live near the "oil capital of Europe" (I hate that name too), so there's quite a lot of ships floating around nearby. Very cool.

speleding• 14 years ago

Do you mean Rotterdam? As far as I can tell it has the highest density of ships in the world.

stunr692• 14 years ago

I guess Aberdeen is the "oil capital of the world"

alexbell• 14 years ago

They also have a great iPhone app.

noinput• 14 years ago

Am I the only one who searched for the Steve Irwin?

mildavw2• 14 years ago

I built an app that combines freely available AIS data with other relevant inventory data and sell subscriptions to some local oil-spill recovery companies: http://demo.dedicatedmaps.com/

davidvaughan• 14 years ago

I'm building something that might be of interest to you. Would it be convenient to contact you? If so, how?

mildavw2• 14 years ago

dave@mailbolt.com

mcrider• 14 years ago

Wow, really cool. My apartment overlooks Vancouver harbour and I can see every ship thats on the map.

leeskye• 14 years ago

I have some friends who do this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTE9Gr0ZmOc

I bet they would love this app.

genkaos• 14 years ago

Somehow related:

http://www.localizatodo.com/mapa/

arebop• 14 years ago

I've been using http://www.boatingsf.com/ais_map.php and I like this better because (1) it's not flash and (2) your dataset is slightly more detailed.

I do miss boatingsf's animations, because it gives me a better idea about the path and trajectory of a ship than just a current position and heading.

camiller• 14 years ago

In the popup for a particular boat click "Show Vessel's Track" which appears to show a set of previous position reports with a line drawn between them.

chrissnell• 14 years ago

Neat, but http://aprs.fi has had this for years. Live cars map, too. :)

apaprocki2• 14 years ago

At Bloomberg, we provide the same live vessel position via the BMAP function on the terminal mainly so that oil / natural gas traders can monitor and speculate commodities flows based on ship traffic and reported contents of ships. Someone posted a screenshot on this Quora question:

http://www.quora.com/Investing/What-are-the-coolest-function...

It is definitely fun to play around with. Similar tools are provided to slice/dice the data to look at all the vessels which match particular criteria.

Similarly, all the data for positions of critical infrastructure (refineries, oil pipelines, power plants, etc) are provided as well as live storm tracking information so traders can determine if natural disasters will affect particular sectors or companies.

bcl2• 14 years ago

If you want to parse the AIS serial data you can use my AISparser project - https://github.com/bcl/aisparser

garazy• 14 years ago

This site is really cool. Everyone interested in this sort of tracking should checkout PlanePlotter from COAA http://www.coaa.co.uk/planeplotter.htm. It does a similar sort of thing but for planes which have ADS-B transmitters and a team of volunteers sharing data. It costs 25 euros to access the shared data but well worth the money (I'm not affiliated just a happy customer).

davedx• 14 years ago

I use this to track the ships my sister works on. Awesome resource :)

stunr692• 14 years ago

I have aggregated some of the other similar sources for vessel tracking:-

http://www.sailwx.info/shiptrack/shiplocations.phtml http://www.mariweb.gr/ecs http://www.vesseltracker.com/app http://vesseltrax.com/ http://www.shippingexplorer.net/en http://www.fleetmon.com/ http://www.shiptracking.eu/ais/ http://www.worldvtsguide.org/index.html

Similarly live air traffic from around the world is aggregated and it uses ADS-B technique to receive flight information from aircraft:-

http://www.radarvirtuel.com/ http://www.flightradar24.com/ http://www.flightstats.com/go/Home/home.do http://casperflights.com/ http://radar.piopawlu.net/

smackfu• 14 years ago

It really needs a shaded overlay or similar that shows the coverage regions. If you don't know that a patch of sea isn't being monitored, it's not exactly reliable data.

Live ships map

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