Shipping Fairway Polygons in the Gulf of Mexico

Polygon data delineates all major shipping lanes associated with ports in the Gulf of Mexico. The layers were modified from GIS data acquired from the U.S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM). No FGDC-compliant metadata is available for the original source files.

Use Cases

• Map shipping lane polygons to analyze proximity to offshore energy infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico.
• Overlay fairway polygons with port locations to study maritime traffic corridors.
• Use non-projected coordinate data in decimal degrees for geospatial analysis of Gulf shipping routes.

Strengths

• Data covers all major shipping lanes associated with all ports in the Gulf of Mexico.
• Spatial data is provided in non-projected coordinates (decimal degrees) for direct geospatial use.
• Source data originates from the authoritative U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM).

Limitations

• No row or column counts, file size, or sample data are provided to assess dataset scale.
• The original source files lack FGDC-compliant metadata, limiting documentation.
• Data is provided only in HTML format, which is non-standard for geospatial polygon data.

Provenance

Source

U.S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM).

Collection Method

GIS data layers were modified from data acquired from the BOEM website.

Freshness

Last updated on 2024-10-19.

Geography

Gulf of Mexico, covering ports in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.