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Visualizing Ship Movements with AIS Data
Explore the beautiful, intricate paths of ships over a year—tracked from America's busiest ports to the open ocean via AIS marine tracking data.
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. Some of these are fishing grounds, others scientific surveys mapping the sea floor, and others show the traffic of boats going to and from offshore oil rigs, like the many constellations of light found off Louisiana's gulf coast. Working with CSVs with the millions of individual data points proved too cumbersome (but cool for animations), so I then switched to the GeoTIFFs, which I loaded into the ever-amazing open-source QGIS, playing around with layer styles to get the right effect.
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