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| San Francisco Bay | New York/New Jersey Harbor | Houston/ Galveston |
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| Tampa Bay | Chesapeake Bay | Narragansett Bay |
| Soo Locks | Los Angeles/Long Beach | Delaware River and Bay |
| Tacoma | Port of Anchorage | New Haven |
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PORTS® Historical Data Retrieval web page.
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The Physical Oceanographic Real-Time System (PORTS®) is a program of the National Ocean Service that supports safe and cost-efficient navigation by providing ship masters and pilots with accurate real-time information required to avoid groundings and collisions. This technological innovation has the potential to save the maritime insurance industry from multi-million dollar claims resulting from shipping accidents. PORTS® includes centralized data acquisition and dissemination systems that provide real-time water levels, currents, and other oceanographic and meteorological data from bays and harbors to the maritime user community in a variety of user friendly formats, including telephone voice response and Internet. Also, PORTS® provides nowcasts and predictions of these parameters with the use of numerical circulation models. Telephone voice access to accurate real-time water level information allows U.S. port authorities and maritime shippers to make sound decisions regarding loading of tonnage (based on available bottom clearance), maximizing loads, and limiting passage times, without compromising safety.
PORTS® is critical to environmental protection, since marine accidents can lead to hazardous material spills that can destroy a bay's ecosystem and the tourism, fishing, and other industries that depend on it. The human, environmental, and economic consequences of marine accidents can be staggering, as demonstrated by the 35 deaths caused by the May 1980 ramming of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge in Tampa Bay (which led to the first PORTS® installation), and the estimated $3 billion cost of the EXXON Valdez accident in 1989.
Several users and potential users of PORTS®, have requested access to PORTS® observations and information in a form that could be used as input to real-time applications. The following document describes a system of flat files to allow users to get access to the data.
FREE Adobe Acrobat Reader (PDF)
