Provider of metocean data to the maritime industry Tidetech Commercial Marine Pty Ltd says it is enhancing the scope of its services in response to a growing demand for marine weather data.
Tidetech generates and curates a wide range of marine weather data for delivery to shipowners and third party software vendors. Its latest enhancement is the introduction of the ‘Data Cube’, which enables users to query the data in three dimensions: longitude, latitude and time.
When a shipowner or operator wants to obtain a weather forecast for their next voyage, see tides and currents on a current passage or perform post-voyage analysis, they can query the data for a specific time and location, explains Managing Director Penny Haire.
“Previously it could take time to access historical data or make predictions about future sailing conditions because of how data was stored. Using a relational database makes the data more available and accessible because the cube is itself made up of data cubes, which can comprise some or all of the weather elements, that can be interrogated either as historical, current or forecast data.”
The Data Cube stores information that can be reorganized, reformatted and manipulated to individual customer requirements in a single, consistent format in constituent parts at the highest resolution. Users can process the data and perform analytics to generate datasets with standard deviation or historical averages and resample or edit data at different resolutions and receive output in any format.
With the costs of compliance rising and the price of bunker fuel likely to rise dramatically when the 2020 global sulfur cap takes effect, demand is increasing for tools that can lower operating costs. Haire says the use of an API enables Tidetech to provide accurate data on a 24/7 basis for ingestion into fleet management systems.
“There has been tangible growth in interest across the last six to nine months in use of integrated metocean data in voyage optimization, from both the bigger players and smaller ones interested in understanding their vessels’ performance. Using weather data of this quality means that vessel operators can predict ETA more accurately and adjust vessel speed to respond to changing conditions and sailing schedule, giving them the opportunity to save fuel by focusing on the optimum route.”
