The use of AIS data to derive a ship-induced wave climate

The Navigation channel is one of the most important assets of a port. It works as a connection between the basin inside a port and the ocean or sea. In the restricted navigation channel, the problems related to the ship wave might occur in the banks along the channel. Moreover, if the navigation channel has a relatively heavy traffic, the probability of problems due to ship waves will be higher. The study area of this thesis is part of the Western Scheldt in the Netherlands. The Western Scheldt is one of busiest channels in Europe connecting the North Sea to the Port of Antwerp. The study area is Bath, which is located in the last corner before the ship from North Sea reaches its destination at Port of Antwerp. Ships that pass through this channel vary from the small to the biggest ones in the world. In order to investigate the area that has a potential problem or even dangerous ship waves, a new idea has been developed. The idea is to combine Automatic Identification System (AIS) data from a database with a rule of thumb to calculate a spatial ship wave distribution. This idea is implemented in a generic tool that can be used to generate ship wave at any point along the Western Scheldt channel by taking advantage of AIS database. For the time being, the formulas that are applied in the ship wave calculations are the basic Schijf formula (1949) for the primary wave and the Verhijn-Bogaert formula (1989) for secondary ones. Important data that are needed as an input to this generic tool are AIS database (ship speed, coordinates, time, etc), bathymetric database, ship properties, water level and, current data. The primary wave is the wave that usually causes problems at a shoreline. Therefore, some improvements to this first order calculation were implemented including the current correction and distance to ship correction. These corrections improved the primary wave predictions, which were compared with the field measurement data at Bath. The main result of this generic tool is histogram, which presents the distribution of ship wave for every cross section generated at the study location. As a result, it can be seen that dangerous ship waves are most likely to occur at the relative narrow cross section channel in the study location. Based on this prediction, dangerous ship waves occur if a relative big ship sails close to a shoreline with a high speed in combination with the current flowing opposite to the direction of the ship