Tidetech Enhances the Scope of its Services

Tidetech Commercial Marine Pty Ltd, a leading provider of metocean data to the maritime industry, is enhancing the scope of its services in response to growing demand for tide, current and other marine weather data.

Tidetech generates and curates a wide range of wind, weather, tidal, wave, current, ice and sea temperature data for delivery to shipowners and third party software vendors. Its latest service enhancement sees Tidetech deploy a relational ‘Data Cube’ which enables users to query weather 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 in a single, consistent format in constituent parts at the highest resolution and data can be reorganised, reformatted and manipulated to individual customer requirements. 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, from Excel to Google Earth files.

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 make a positive contribution to lowering operating costs. Haire says the use of an API enables Tidetech to provide meaningful and 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 optimisation, 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.”