Automatic Identification System (AIS) signals collected by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority provide vessel position reports across the entire Australian Search and Rescue Region from September 2012 onward. The Australian Ocean Data Network processes monthly files into annual datasets, applying H3 spatial indexing and cleaning to create a harmonized record. This product captures vessel traffic across international shipping lanes, coastal corridors, fishing grounds, and offshore resource areas.
Use Cases
- Analyze shipping traffic density and patterns based on vessel position reports across major international lanes.
- Model vessel activity in fishing grounds and offshore resource extraction areas based on geospatial coordinates.
- Track temporal trends in maritime traffic over more than a decade based on the standardized time-series data.
- Validate and clean AIS data streams based on the documented workflow that separates invalid or duplicate reports.
Strengths
- Data spans from September 2012 to the most recently completed month, providing over a decade of temporal coverage.
- Processing includes cleaning, validation, conversion to UTC timestamps, and H3 spatial indexing at resolution 8 (~0.7 km2).
- Invalid or duplicate reports are separated into a dedicated rejected records dataset, documenting data quality steps.
Limitations
- Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
- Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
- File formats listed are PNG, HTML, PDF, suggesting primary documentation may be in these formats rather than the raw data files.
Provenance
- Source
- Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s Craft Tracking System (CTS) and Mariweb databases.
- Collection Method
- AIS signals collected via terrestrial and satellite receivers, processed and standardized into annual datasets.
- Time Range
- September 2012 - ongoing
- Freshness
- Last updated 2026-04-18 20:02:47.616209; freshness should be verified.
- Geography
- Australian Search and Rescue Region