Map of navigation facility with channels

Navigation Infrastructure and GIS

To accomplish the mission of collecting commercial vessel movements from their origin to destination points, an accurate inventory of navigation facilities and points of interests is needed. WCSC tracks and develops a variety of navigation facility products that share the characteristics, location, operations, dimensions, and other attributes of docks and port facilities. This data is available via Master Docks Plus, the complete dock list, and Domestic and Foreign Port Facilities lists.

 

Master Docks Plus

Master Docks Plus provides data for over 40,000 port-and-waterway facilities and other navigation points of interest that describe the physical and inter-modal (infrastructure) characteristics of sites at the coastal, Great Lakes, and inland ports of the United States; with additional data for facilities in Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the trust territories of the Pacific. The data include location (latitude/longitude, waterway, mile, and bank); operations (name, owner, operator, purpose, handling equipment, rates, and details of open-and-covered storage facilities); and type and dimension of construction (length of berthing space for vessels and/or barges, depth, deck elevation, and details of rail-and-highway access).The most recently published Master Docks.KMZ file

Complete Dock List

The Complete Dock List Spreadsheet containing a list of all facility types (dock, anchorage, mile point, etc.) that may be reported as the origin or destination of commercial waterborne vessel moves. Attributes included in the list are the unique navigation-unit identifier, official name, facility type, latitude/longitude, United Nations Location Code, service initiation date, service termination date, port name, waterway name, and mile. Data included is for all facility types that were available for use during the previous two years.

 

Port and Waterways Facilities

Port Facilities are similar to the Complete Dock List but have an expanded list of attributes not including mile points. Additional attributes include a location description, street address, city, state, zip code, county, congressional district, owners, operators, highway-and-railway connections, commodities, type of construction, cargo-handling equipment, water depth alongside the facility, berthing space, and deck height. The Schedule K Classification of Foreign Ports lists the major seaports of the world directly handling waterborne shipments in the foreign trade of the United States, and includes numeric codes identifying these ports. Data is updated on an as needed or requested basis, but the most recently published Port Facilities extracts can by found here.

 

Navigational Map and Tools on a desk

National Waterway Network (NWN)

The National Waterway Network (NWN) is a geographic database of navigable waterways and channels in and around the United States, for analytical studies of navigation performance, for compiling commodity flow statistics, and for mapping purposes. The NWN is comprised of a link database and a node database. Links are line strings, which consist of beginning and end points (nodes) with intermediate vertices (shape points). Links represent either actual shipping lanes (i.e., channels, Intracoastal Waterways, sealanes, rivers) or serve as representative paths in open water (where no defined shipping paths exist). Nodes may represent physical entities such as river confluence's, ports/facilities, and intermodal terminals, USACE nodes, or may be inserted for analytical purposes (i.e., to facilitate routing).

Linktons
Tonnage is summarized for each link in the National Waterway Network by commodity and direction (up bound and down bound). The commodities include: Coal | Petroleum Products | Chemicals | Crude Materials | Manufactured Goods | Farm Products | Machinery | Waste | Unknown

Principal Ports List
The Principal Port file contains USACE port codes, geographic locations(longitude, latitude), names, and commodity tonnage summaries (total tons, domestic, foreign, imports and exports) for Principal USACE Ports.