Australian Search and Rescue Region: Vessel Tracking - Aggregated data product (2012 - ongoing) (NESP MaC 5.9, IMOS)

The vessel tracking data in this product originates from the Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s (AMSA) Craft Tracking System (CTS) and Mariweb databases. These systems collect Automatic Identification System (AIS) signals from ships using both terrestrial and satellite receivers. AIS data from these sources, covering the period from September 2012 to the most recently completed month, provides vessel position reports across the entire Australian Search and Rescue Region. This extensive spatial footprint captures vessel traffic across major international shipping lanes, coastal navigation corridors, fishing grounds and offshore resource extraction areas. Each record represents a single vessel position defined by geographic coordinates and the time of transmission in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).To create a consistent and usable dataset, the monthly AMSA vessel tracking files have been processed and standardised into a set of single annual datasets. This processing includes ingesting the source Shapefiles from AMSA’s operational data service, cleaning and validating the vessel position reports, converting timestamps to UTC, applying H3 spatial indexing (resolution 4, ~1,700 km2), and ensuring all records follow a uniform data schema. Any invalid or duplicate reports identified during this workflow are separated into a dedicated rejected records dataset. The resulting product is a harmonised, reliable, and reproducible record of vessel movements throughout the Australian Search and Rescue Region over more than a decade.