Marine Cadastre
https://hub.marinecadastre.gov/pages/vesseltraffic
Vessel traffic data, or Automatic Identification System (AIS) data, are collected by the U.S. Coast Guard through an onboard navigation safety device that transmits and monitors the location and characteristics of vessels in U.S. and international waters in real time. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Coast Guard Navigation Center have worked together to repurpose some of the most important records and make these records available to the public. These records are sourced from the U.S. Coast Guard’s national network of AIS receivers called the Nationwide Automatic Identification System. Information such as location, time, vessel type, speed, length, beam, and draft have been extracted from the raw data and prepared for analyses in desktop geographic information system (GIS) software. Note that Marine Cadastre does not have access to live AIS data feeds or more recent data than what is provided on this webpage.
data shipping traces | permalink | 2024-09-24 09:52:56

Visualizing Ship Movements with AIS Data
https://www.beautifulpublicdata.com/visualizing-ship-movements-with-ais-data/


Using NOAA’s “Marine Cadastre” tool, you can download 16 years’ worth of detailed daily ship movements (filtered to the minute), in addition to “transit count” maps generated from a year’s worth of data to show each ship's accumulated paths.

I downloaded all of 2023's transit count maps and loaded them up in QGIS to visualize this year of marine traffic.

The resulting maps are abstract, electric and revealing. . When you remove the landmasses from the map and leave only the ship traces, the lines resemble long-exposure photos of sparklers, high-energy particle collisions, or strands of illuminated fiber optic wire. However, when you reveal ports, harbors, islands, and ferry lines, the ship traces take on meaning and order.
art geography shipping traces | permalink | 2024-09-24 09:51:49