Strait of Hormuz Monitor

Vessel positions come from the Automatic Identification System (AIS), a collision-avoidance standard that commercial vessels broadcast every few seconds. Terrestrial AIS receivers have a practical range of roughly 30–50 nautical miles. Anything in the middle of the strait falls outside that range and is covered here by a satellite AIS feed that polls every 2 hours. So: terrestrial positions are effectively real-time near the coasts, and mid-strait positions are accurate but delayed up to two hours.

No. AIS is required by the International Maritime Organization only for commercial vessels over ~300 gross tonnes on international voyages, plus passenger ships. That means this dashboard will miss:

• Military vessels. Navy ships, coast guard patrol boats, and most non-civilian government vessels routinely operate with AIS off (a legal exemption on security grounds).
• Small craft. Dhows, fishing boats, pleasure craft below the tonnage threshold are generally not equipped with Class-A AIS.
• Vessels that have “gone dark”. Transponders can be turned off or spoofed. This is a known tactic on sanction-evasion shipping routes — you will see periods where known vessels disappear from the map entirely.
• Jammed areas. During military exercises or active conflict, AIS signals can be deliberately jammed or spoofed across a whole region; positions in that area become unreliable.

The counts on this dashboard should be read as commercial AIS-visible traffic, not a complete census of ships in the strait.

AIS is an unauthenticated broadcast — any transmitter can send any MMSI, name, or position it wants, and receivers accept it at face value. That makes several forms of deception routine, especially on sanction-evasion routes around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz:

• Identity spoofing.A vessel transmits the MMSI of a different (usually decommissioned) ship. Known Iranian “ghost fleet” tankers have been observed broadcasting identities of ships scrapped years earlier.
• Position falsification.A transmitter reports coordinates in one location while the vessel is physically somewhere else. Open-source investigations have tracked tankers “broadcasting” laps off Africa while their real positions were photographed loading at Kharg Island.
• Dark-period stitching. A ship turns AIS off in one location, moves to a sensitive area, and turns it back on with a position that looks continuous with where it left off, disguising the intervening leg.
• Name/flag changes. Mid-voyage renames and reflags are common on sanctioned fleets; the same physical vessel can appear under three names in a month.

This dashboard does not attempt to detect spoofing — it shows what vessels broadcast. Apparent anomalies (identical MMSIs in two places, impossible speeds, sudden teleports, or a vessel reappearing far from its last position) are worth treating as suspect rather than factual. For rigorous spoof-detection work, corroborate with satellite imagery (Sentinel, Planet) and dedicated analytics providers (Windward, Kpler).

It's the sum of two signals: vessels observed at anchor or at a Gulf port (Dubai, Fujairah, etc.) based on the live AIS feed, and the number of vessels that major carriers (Maersk, MSC, CMA CGM, etc.) have publicly reported as trapped outside the strait. We take the larger of the two to avoid under-counting.

It's computed. The backend looks at observed transit volume over the last 24 hours versus the historical baseline (~20 M barrels/day of throughput, ~3,000 ship transits a month) and categorizes the strait as Open / Reduced / Restricted / Closed. This is independent of political announcements — if ships are moving, it reads as open.

Two sources, both plotted on the oil page. The EIA (U.S. Energy Information Administration) is authoritative for daily settlement prices — stored under the_EIA suffix. Yahoo Finance provides minute-level intraday data via the same ticker symbols; those drive the live ticker and the sparkline on the dashboard. The two usually agree to within a few cents at settlement.

RSS feeds from Google News, BBC, Al Jazeera, NYT, Reuters, and CNBC, plus keyword queries against NewsAPI. Articles are bucketed into military, diplomatic, economic, or general based on the feed they came from and, in the case of NewsAPI, the query that found them. Statements from Donald Trump's Truth Social account are pulled separately and tagged as statements. Article timestamps reflect the published date on the source, not when we synced them.

Vessel positions are stored with a 90-day TTL, so the time-range filter on the vessels page can show anything up to ~3 months back — but only for data we've collected since the dashboard began ingesting. The project went live recently, so historical coverage is still shallow and grows by the day. Older positions simply won't appear in results for dates before we were running.We can backfill deeper history for a specific vessel on demand via Data Docked's historical endpoint (up to 2 years back). The cost scales with the time window, so we don't auto-backfill the whole fleet; ask the operator if you need a particular MMSI's full track.

Pipeline operators don't publish live utilization figures. The three bypass pipelines tracked here (Saudi East–West, UAE ADCOP, Iraq–Turkey Kirkuk–Ceyhan) are initialized from seed data and updated manually when EIA or operator statements confirm a change. The historical series is a modeled approximation of crisis-period utilization based on published operator announcements, not a live measurement.

Yes — most pages have an Export button that downloads the currently-visible data as CSV. For programmatic access, the underlying REST API is documented at/api-docs and requires an API key. All read endpoints are public; write endpoints require admin credentials.

No. This dashboard is for situational awareness and research. Don't trade on it.