Thursday, September 9, 2010
Merchant Shipping
Canadian authorities keep records of all merchant vessels
plying their waters. In confined areas, such as major
ports and the St. Lawrence Seaway,
Vessel
Traffic Services
maintain
detailed continuous coverage of the vessels’ location.
Furthermore, ships from foreign countries must call in
far in advance, as well as periodically during their transit,
indicating their position, origin, and destination amongst
other details.
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| In order to use these data in MARIS,
each trip made by a vessel must to be represented by a geographically
referenced line, as accurately as possible, following the
actual route the vessel had taken. This was achieved using
a track generation
algorithm designed by MARIN. After this information has
been aggregated, the calculated values can be represented
in MARIS using
various renderers.
Using different tools in MARIS,
researchers can look at different aspects of the information.
For instance, traffic density can be illustrated using colour-coded
grids; maximum and minimum tonnage could be compared using
pie (or histograms) charts; density of persons on water
could be illustrated using dot density charts. This figure
shows representative shipping densities over several years,
with incidents superimposed. |
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