The Moving Sea
Tides · Currents · Shipping · Open data

The moving
sea

Tides, currents and ships, made visible from open data. It starts on the Scheldt, around the port of Antwerp and along the Belgian coast, with Rotterdam and the southern North Sea alongside, and reaches out to pilotage waters in Europe and North America and to the world ocean as a whole. Every video is built from measurements, hydrodynamic models or official stream atlases.

Measured

Surface currents from Rijkswaterstaat's HF radar, which reads the speed of the water from radio waves reflected off the waves, roughly every 300 m and every minute.

Model

Rijkswaterstaat's operational forecast models (SCALWEST, OSR, DCSM-FM) as published in the open RWsOS viewer. They compute the current on a fine grid every few minutes.

Atlas

The Stroomatlas Zeeschelde by Flanders Hydraulics Research (hourly vectors for a mean spring tide from the SCALDIS model) and the Stroomatlas Zeebrugge 2024 (every 20 minutes, mean of the top 10 m), interpolated in time and space.

AIS

Ship positions broadcast by every seagoing vessel, collected over 24 hours through aisstream.io and drawn as tracks, swing circles and a distance-time diagram.

Use

Every video and image can be downloaded or embedded on another site. Please credit the source shown with each video. Not for navigation.

Hydrographic and data sources

Each video is labelled as measured, model or atlas. Atlas videos show average astronomical tides; model videos are forecasts for that specific day, including the forecast wind. Not for navigation.