Reference · built on requestCommons signalAviation & marine

MarineCadastre Vessel Traffic

Historical US Coast Guard NAIS vessel positions for US waters as daily zipped CSV files by year, plus vessel track and transit count grids.

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About

MarineCadastre is run by the NOAA Office for Coastal Management with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. Its vessel traffic collection republishes broadcast points from the US Coast Guard's Nationwide Automatic Identification System, about 200 land-based receiving stations, plus Army Corps of Engineers data for inland waterways. From 2015 onward each day is a compressed CSV at coast.noaa.gov/htdata/CMSP/AISDataHandler with 17 fields: MMSI, BaseDateTime, LAT, LON, SOG, COG, Heading, VesselName, IMO, CallSign, VesselType, Status, Length, Width, Draft, Cargo, and TransceiverClass. Raw NMEA records are down-sampled to the nearest whole minute. Data begin in 2009. Nothing is live.

An operator loads the days for your port and proposes a berth plan, a demand outlook, or a benchmark built on what vessels actually did.

This is a reference listing. It documents what Fibric would read from MarineCadastre Vessel Traffic and what it could propose, based on the publisher's published interfaces. Fibric builds it under a managed deployment when you request it; selecting it here installs nothing.

Inputs

  • Daily broadcast point files by year at AISDataHandler/<year>/AIS_<year>_<mm>_<dd>.zip; CSV from 2015 onward, File Geodatabase before
  • Per record: MMSI, BaseDateTime in UTC, LAT, LON, SOG in knots, COG and Heading in degrees, Status, TransceiverClass A or B
  • Vessel identity per record: VesselName, IMO, CallSign, VesselType, Cargo, and Length, Width, and Draft in meters
  • Annual Vessel Track and Transit Count products derived from the points on 100 meter grid cells, delivered as GeoPackage
  • AccessAIS for extracts by custom area and time period under 2 GB
  • The AIS Base Stations dataset and service through the Marine Cadastre Data Registry

Proposed actions

Read-only. This feed informs operators; it changes nothing.

Proposed actions are target capabilities. Every action runs propose-first and needs a validated deployment and the appropriate permissions.

What you can build

  • Benchmark berth turnaround against the port

    Load a season of points for your terminal's bounding box. The operator computes dwell per MMSI and proposes a benchmark note comparing your berths with neighbouring ones.

    With Site Benchmark, Dock Schedule

  • Forecast covers from cruise and ferry calls

    Read historical arrivals by VesselType at the nearest pier. The operator proposes a cover forecast for the same weeks next season, showing the calls it counted.

    With Cover Forecast, Demand Outlook

  • Plan yard moves around recurring vessel calls

    Query the days around past calls of the same IMO. The operator proposes a yard and dock plan built on the observed arrival pattern, for your approval.

    With Yard Moves, Dock Schedule

Requirements

  • Bulk storage and a loader for daily zips; the 2024 set totals 116.7 GB
  • A lookup table for VesselType, Status, and Cargo codes from NOAA's AIS Vessel Type and Group Codes
  • Stable identifiers for tracking: MMSI, IMO, or CallSign rather than VesselName
  • Handling for the 2025 field renames to lowercase names such as base_date_time and transceiver
Authentication
None. Daily files are open HTTPS downloads from coast.noaa.gov; AccessAIS is a web application for custom extracts.

Limits

  • No live or near real-time feed; days are published once processing is complete
  • Coverage ends 40 to 50 miles from the coast; foreign waters and remote Pacific territories are absent
  • Alaska broadcast points were removed from March 29, 2021 at the request of the Marine Exchange of Alaska
  • Positions come from land-based receivers only; voyage fields such as destination were phased out in 2015

Access and pricing

Reference listing. Public feed access is separate from Fibric integration. If you request this feed, your quote covers the build, usage, and support.

Request MarineCadastre Vessel Traffic ↗

Questions and answers

Is there a live AIS feed?
No. The FAQ says live data feeds are not available through this platform. The latest data are published as soon as processing is complete, with no restriction or embargo. The earliest year available is 2009.
Are Class B and small vessels included?
Class B data are included, and the class designation is provided for each record after 2017. Many smaller vessels are exempt from AIS carriage because of length or displacement, and certain law enforcement and military vessels are excluded.
Why are some positions on land or far offshore?
GPS errors and vessels in narrow inland waterways can place points on shore. Signals far beyond receiver range usually come from anomalous propagation such as tropospheric ducting; NOAA says these are not satellite-derived and should not be viewed as erroneous.
Ask about MarineCadastre Vessel Traffic

Ask about the capabilities and requirements in this listing.

For project-specific requirements, contact Fibric.

This Commons signal listing is developed, published, and supported by Fibric. It reads public data published by NOAA Office for Coastal Management and BOEM (coast.noaa.gov, hub.marinecadastre.gov). Upstream agencies and projects are the property of their respective owners, who are not affiliated with Fibric and do not sponsor or endorse this listing. Trademark policy