It’s a tale as old as time; we need to send more goods across the oceans, we need to do it faster, we need to use less fuel, emit fewer emissions, and deal with increasing port, harbor, and climate complexities.
This leaves little choice but to optimize each and every aspect of a ship and its voyage. While wind and wave routing have matured over decades, ocean currents remain an unoptimized variable in passage planning, especially as it pertains to highly dynamic current environments along coastal regions and in Ports and Harbors.
Cut Fuel Costs and Tighten Time Windows
Save up to an additional 10% in fuel and tighten time windows by up to 1 hour when accounting for coastal currents with higher resolution forecasts.
Proof Point: Route Adjustment for Fuel Savings
By ingesting high-resolution surface current vectors directly into your passage-planning engine, your software could resolve current set and drift into precise along-track (effective) and cross-track components.
Keep reading
Because required engine power scales cubically with water-relative speed,
P ∝ (STW)3
small changes in along-track current directly dictate your fuel burn profile.
Routing around adverse vectors or throttling back Speed Through Water (STW) to leverage a favorable effective current lets you hit your arrival window at a fraction of the engine load—achieved by streaming high-density spatial vector fields from our API straight into your existing ECDIS or voyage optimization software.
Scenario
Current (Vc)
STW
Engine Load
Fuel Rate
Fuel Delta
1 kn Head Current
-1 kn
19 kn
+17.6%
8.23 MT/hr
+17.6%
Still Water Baseline
0 kn
18 kn
Baseline (40 MW)
7.00 MT/hr
0.0%
1 kn Tail Current
+1 kn
17 kn
-15.8%
5.90 MT/hr
-15.8%
Illustrative 10,000 TEU Container Ship Baseline (18 kn SOG Target)
Raise Under-Keel Confidence and Reduce Risks
Actual water levels deviate up to 0.5 meter when predicted by tides alone. Water levels predicted using every variable input provide a more accurate picture to determine whether your transit proceeds, and helps prevent current-driven anchor dragging collision and grounding.
By pairing full-depth 3D water-column velocity profiles with local tidal forecasts in your Dynamic Under-Keel Clearance (DUKC) and passage-planning software, you can accurately model hydrodynamic squat, shear, and swept path expansion through shallow or dredged channels.
Keep reading
Because vessel squat scales quadratically with Speed Through Water,
Squat ∝ (STW)2
unmodeled along-track currents that force higher engine speeds dramatically erode your bottom clearance.
Integrating full 3D current fields lets you optimize speed profiles en route to minimize dynamic draft, safely squeeze tidal windows, and hit Just-In-Time (JIT) berth arrivals without schedule padding or unsafe anchorage delays—implemented by streaming localized vector datasets via our API or modeling high-risk channels together.
Scenario
Current (Vc)
STW
Squat
Dynamic UKC
Status
1 kn Head Current
-1 kn
11.0 kn
1.03 m
0.97 m
Safety Breach
Still Water Baseline
0 kn
10.0 kn
0.85 m
1.15 m
Compliant
1 kn Tail Current
+1 kn
9.0 kn
0.69 m
1.31 m
Optimal
Illustrative 14.0 m Draft Vessel in a 16.0 m Channel Depth (Target 10 kn SOG, Minimum Safe UKC: 1.00 m)
