Ship route forecast, Singapore - Taiwan

Weather forecast can be visualised through ship routes - shortest path usually means mild weather. Our model optimises using fuel consumption models from ITTC (International Towing Tank Conference) and ship characteristics, transforming these variables into fuel efficient paths for ship operators. Six variables of weather forecast, 2t, 10u, 10v, swh, mwd and pp1d (2m surface temperature, 10m surface zonal wind, 10m surface meridional wind, significant wave height, mean wave direction and peak wave period) are used in routing.

Medium range weather forecast are known to underestimate abnormal conditions like typhoon, so user should check the result against other sources. As the weather forecast does not originate from us, we make no warranty as to the accuracy and we do not accept any liability whatsoever for any error. It is provided on an "as is" basis. Note that weather forecast degrades with time, so runs closer to forecast date (earlier departure of the 2 dates) will be more accurate. We acknowledge European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts for their open access data.

The plots below show wind and wave which the ship encounters at time of waypoint. When ship speed changes, a specific latitude-longitude is reached at a different time which means that the corresponding arrows will be from a different time step. The ship is a 53000 GWT Handymax bulker and the runs are updated every 2 weekly, so that there are departures every week.

Owing to ship characteristics and the presence of land as shields from wind/wave, some routes may not vary much. The effects of weather should not be overlooked - even when the optimised routes are similar, waypoints where wind/wave are high vary a lot. For adverse weather, stricter wind/wave limits should be imposed to take calmer but longer path. Routing can also be refined with forbidden zones, and varying ship speed. What-if analysis should the ship be mounted with wind-assisted devices can be conducted easily. Such evaluation is omitted due to space constraint, and user should email us when there is a need.

Each jpg file is self-contained and amenable to AI vision-language models, for example, prompted with "compare these 2 images" for automated analysis. Knowledge bases can be built to search for historical adverse weather using information like the maximum wind/wave encountered along the routes. AI language models offer a quick way to analyse the combination of weather variables with ship characteristics, and archives of our runs are available upon request.

This page presents Singapore to Kaohsiung. More routes are found in other pages.