AIS-Assisted Service Provision and Crowdsourcing of Marine Meteorological Information

Ship navigation and operational activities at sea need meteorological and hydrographic information to enhance safety and efficiency. Besides observations collected from deployed data buoys, marine meteorological information services rely on weather observation reports from ships to increase the data density and thus service quality. Automatic Identification System (AIS), adopted internationally to facilitate ship-ship and ship-shore data exchange, has developed into communication links between ship/shore and buoys with many potential applications. This paper presents AIS applications designed and implemented for marine meteorological information services in a long-term project initiated by the Central Weather Bureau of Taiwan. Achievements of this initiative include: versatile service delivery via shore-based AIS network to shipborne application platforms such as smart phones, remote controllable moving weather data collection, and assisted sharing of weather observation reports from ships. Typhoon forecast and warning is one of the key applications implemented for this region