Safer PORTS

By Craig Collins

If you live in a coastal area, you’ve probably noticed: Commercial ships are bigger these days. Manufacturers and operators are squeezing as much as they can out of each shipment, and cargo ships – and even passenger cruise liners – are getting longer, wider, deeper, and taller to maximize the volume of each transit. Even small increases have a significant effect: An extra inch of draft (the distance from a vessel’s keel up to the waterline), for example, could allow a cargo ship to carry an additional 31,552 laptop computers, worth more than $21.8 million, in a single shipment. Since the 1960s, when containerized shipping became an industry standard, the capacity of cargo vessels has increased by about 1,500 percent.

As container ships continue to grow in size and ports grow more congested by the year, NOAA plays an increasingly critical role in U.S. marine transportation. NOAA services and products improve the efficiency of ports and harbors, promote safety, and help to ensure the protection of coastal marine resources.

At the same time, Americans are more dependent on maritime commerce than ever: By far, the most common route for our nation’s trade is by sea. According to the nonprofit Bipartisan Policy Center, 99 percent of America’s overseas trade passes through ports, which are responsible for $4.6 trillion in economic activity – about one-fourth of the U.S. economy, accounting for 23.1 million jobs.

Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services staff installs an air gap sensor on the Don Holt Bridge in Charleston, South Carolina. The sensor is part of the Charleston Harbor Physical Oceanographic Real-Time System, or PORTS ® . Information from the sensor is critical for under bridge clearance, as ships continue to maximize channel depths and widths while, at the same time, pushing the bounds of bridge heights.

A growing number of huge vessels vying for berths can create risks for navigation safety. These bigger vessels can, if they encounter obstacles (i.e., a harbor bridge that does not allow a large vessel to pass underneath at high tide), bog down and back up traffic, an inefficiency that can cost them and other operators millions of dollars. Because most ports are located at the mouths of river estuaries, which provide critical habitat for important biological resources – including nurseries and spawning grounds for 70 percent of U.S. fisheries – an accidental spill could have disastrous consequences.

PORTS data charts for Old Port Tampa, Florida.

Maritime commerce has tripled over the last 50 years, and freight traffic is expected to increase another 45 percent by 2045.

To reduce these risks to safety, efficiency, and ecology, NOAA’s Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (CO-OPS), part of the National Ocean Service, began in 1991 to package all the relevant data about weather and oceanographic conditions in port environments and deliver it to mariners. PORTS (Physical Oceanographic Real-Time System), in conjunction with up-to-date nautical charts and accurate positioning, delivers mariners all the information they need about local conditions.

PORTS data charts for Old Port Tampa, Florida.

The air gap sensor installed on the Dames Point Bridge in Jacksonville, Florida.

It works like this: NOAA forms a partnership with a local community or port authority, who agrees to install an array of sensing equipment. These sensor suites are tailored to the needs of a particular port, and can collect data on things such as tides and water level, atmospheric pressure, currents, wind speed and direction, air and water temperature, waves, visibility (fog), and air gap – the height between the bottom of a bridge and the surface of water. NOAA then collects and processes this data, and develops products to provide to the general public – online, in a graphical interface available to anyone with internet access, or via a voice system that users can dial into.

PORTS has become a key element of the informational infrastructure that has improved the safety and efficiency of maritime commerce – but it’s proven valuable for other users as well, including recreational boaters and fishers. PORTS data can be used to help monitor and contain accidental spills, or to help plan and execute search and rescue operations. Since its 1991 rollout in Tampa, Florida, the system has expanded to serve about a third of the major U.S. seaports on the Pacific, Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and

Great Lakes coasts and waterways. NOAA has estimated that safety and efficiency improvements alone, if PORTS were expanded to serve all of the major U.S. seaports, would result in a savings of $300 million annually – within a decade saving the maritime industry more than $2.5 billion.