Data & methods
The fusion is the product
Value in maritime analytics does not come from a single feed. It comes from fusing cooperative AIS with non-cooperative radar and optical imagery, metocean and bathymetry, and registry and regulatory reference data — then applying modern ML and agentic systems. We are vendor-neutral about the sources and opinionated about the method.
Data sources we work with
A working catalogue — open, freemium and commercial. We help you choose the right mix for the question, not the biggest invoice.
| Source | Type | Access | Detail | Primary use |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Satellite & terrestrial AIS | Vessel tracking | Commercial | Kpler AIS, Spire, S&P/ORBCOMM; T-AIS near-instant, enhanced S-AIS ~6 min | Live positions, port calls, dark-activity |
| NOAA MarineCadastre AIS | Terrestrial AIS | Open | US coastal historical archives | Free historical traffic analysis |
| Copernicus Sentinel-1 (SAR) | C-band radar | Open | ~5–20 m, all-weather day/night; 1C/1D carry onboard AIS | Non-cooperative / dark-ship detection |
| Copernicus Sentinel-2 (optical) | Multispectral | Open | 10 m, 5-day revisit, cloud-limited | Optical vessel & coastal detection |
| ICEYE / Umbra / Planet | Commercial imagery | Commercial | SAR to ~25 cm; PlanetScope ~3 m daily | Confirm & classify detections |
| Copernicus Marine (CMEMS) | Ocean physics | Open | Currents, SST, SSH, waves; ~8 km global to 500 m regional | Routing & fuel optimisation |
| NOAA GFS / WaveWatch III | Metocean forecast | Open | Wind ~13 km; waves ~50 km, to 5–16 days | Weather routing |
| ECMWF ERA5 / Open Data | Reanalysis / NWP | Freemium | ERA5 ~31 km hourly 1940→; open subset 0.25° | ML training & backtesting |
| GEBCO / EMODnet bathymetry | Bathymetry | Open | GEBCO 15 arc-sec; EMODnet ~115 m (EU) | Under-keel clearance, depth routing |
| Global Fishing Watch | Fishing / events | Open | AIS effort 2012–2024, events & vessels APIs, SAR layers | IUU, encounters, transshipment |
| UN Comtrade | Trade flows | Freemium | Bilateral HS trade, 1962→ | Demand-side flow context |
| EU MRV (THETIS-MRV) | Emissions | Open | Per-ship verified annual CO₂ & fuel, >5000 GT, 2018→ | Emissions ground truth & CII context |
| Equasis / Clarksons / S&P Sea-web | Registries | Freemium | Identity, ownership, PSC, ship particulars | Identity resolution & due diligence |
Latency and resolution figures are typical vendor-stated values and vary with traffic density, tasking and mode.
The methods we apply
Eight core capabilities. Most engagements combine several.
Trajectory modelling & anomaly detection
Learn normal behaviour per ship-type and route from AIS kinematics, then flag deviations — course/speed anomalies, gaps, loitering, impossible kinematics. Sequence models (LSTM/GRU, Transformers), reconstruction and WGAN-GP scoring, over unsupervised route baselines.
Dark-vessel & sanctions-evasion detection
The flagship capability: correlate AIS with SAR/optical detections — a radar hit with no matching AIS is a candidate dark ship — fused with gap, loitering and rendezvous reasoning. Anchored by the 2024 Nature result that ~75% of fishing vessels are untracked.
ETA & voyage / weather routing
ML ETA regressors on historical voyages plus physics-aware routing over gridded metocean (CMEMS, WW3, ECMWF) with bathymetry constraints and vessel fuel curves. Objective trades time vs fuel vs CII penalty.
Emissions estimation (CII / EEXI, MRV-grade)
Bottom-up activity model — AIS speed/time × vessel-specific power/fuel curves → fuel → CO₂ — calibrated against verified EU MRV totals so AIS-based estimates are credible to lenders and verifiers.
Demand & flow forecasting
Fuse port-call time series (AIS geofencing) with trade signals (UN Comtrade) and seasonality; classical and ML time-series, increasingly time-series foundation models for zero/few-shot forecasting across many ports.
Foundation models for geospatial & time-series
Fine-tune geospatial FMs (Prithvi-EO, TerraMind) for SAR/optical vessel detection, and apply time-series FMs (TimesFM, Chronos) to ETA and demand. Maritime-specific fine-tunes are R&D, not turnkey — we treat them accordingly.
LLM / agentic maritime-intelligence pipelines
Retrieval over vessel, registry and regulatory corpora; agents orchestrating AIS, SAR and weather APIs; natural-language alerting with cited evidence — explainable copilots in the spirit of research systems like AIS-LLM.
Identity resolution & network analysis
Resolve MMSI ↔ IMO ↔ beneficial owner across Equasis, S&P and Clarksons; graph analytics over ownership, management and co-occurrence to expose the shell structures behind sanctioned or IUU fleets.
Explainable by default
Every score ships with its data lineage and a reason a human can defend. Regulators, underwriters and analysts cannot act on a black box.
Calibrated to ground truth
Emissions estimates reconcile to verified EU MRV; detections corroborate against imagery. We validate against something real, not against ourselves.
Honest about the frontier
Maritime-specific foundation models are still research. We deploy what works today and treat the frontier as R&D, clearly labelled.
Bring us your hardest data question.
Whether you want to work with us, invest, or just pressure-test an idea — we reply to every serious enquiry within one business day.