How I Track Every Ship in the Strait of Hormuz in Real Time

johnsmalls22-rgb — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 15:34:38 +0000

21 million barrels of oil pass through the Strait of Hormuz every day. I built a real-time intelligence dashboard that tracks every vessel, detects dark ships, and monitors the crisis.

Live Demo | GitHub

Why I Built This

During the 2019 tanker attacks, I realized there was no public tool combining vessel tracking, oil prices, and naval positions. Analysts were switching between MarineTraffic, Bloomberg, and USNI Fleet Tracker. I wanted one dashboard.

What It Tracks

88+ vessels via AIS — updated every 5 seconds
Dark ships — vessels with disabled transponders
Brent and WTI oil prices — 90-day history (EIA + FRED)
Daily transit counts — IMF PortWatch data
10 US Navy carriers — positions via GDELT/USNI
7-day maritime weather — wind warnings
Breaking news — Google News RSS

Tech Stack

Next.js 16 + React 19
Mapbox GL JS with custom GeoJSON layers
Recharts for charts
Tailwind CSS 4
TypeScript

Dark Ship Detection

Some vessels disable AIS transponders. My approach:

Detect when a vessel stops broadcasting (last timestamp > 2 hours)
Estimate position based on last known course and shipping lane geometry
Render estimates along the Traffic Separation Scheme centerline
Show uncertainty visually

The shipping lane centerline is the key insight. The strait has well-defined inbound and outbound lanes. Dark ships are almost certainly in this corridor.

Water Polygon Filter

GPS drift places 10-15% of vessels on land. I built a 40-vertex polygon tracing the Gulf coastline:

function isInWater(lat: number, lon: number): boolean {
  let inside = false;
  for (let i = 0, j = WATER.length - 1; i < WATER.length; j = i++) {
    const [xi, yi] = WATER[i];
    const [xj, yj] = WATER[j];
    if ((yi > lon) !== (yj > lon) &&
        lat < ((xj - xi) * (lon - yi)) / (yj - yi) + xi) {
      inside = !inside;
    }
  }
  return inside;
}

Carrier Tracking via GDELT

The Navy does not publish carrier positions. But GDELT ingests news worldwide and extracts locations. Querying for carrier names (CVN-68 through CVN-78) gives ~100km accuracy.

All Data Sources Are Free

Source	Data	Key Required
AISStream	Vessel positions	Free tier
EIA	Oil spot prices	Free
FRED	Historical oil	Free
IMF PortWatch	Transit counts	No
Open-Meteo	Weather	No
GDELT	Carrier positions	No
Google News	Headlines	No

Run It Yourself

git clone https://github.com/johnsmalls22-rgb/hormuz-tracker.git
cd hormuz-tracker
npm install
cp .env.example .env.local
npm run dev

What I Learned

Maritime data is surprisingly accessible
GPS drift is worse than expected — water polygon filter is essential
Dark ship detection is estimation, not tracking
Mapbox GL is perfect for geospatial intelligence dashboards

If you are interested in geopolitical intelligence, check out The Board — 766K+ articles from 6,000+ sources with AI analysis.

Full Hormuz blockade analysis

Questions? GitHub Issues

DEV Community: johnsmalls22-rgb