Tech Specs

Where the station list comes from

The registry of which stations exist is built from two sources. For the National Electricity Market (NEM — QLD, NSW, VIC, SA, TAS), we use AEMO's DUID Registry— AEMO's authoritative list of every generating unit it dispatches, keyed by DUID (Dispatchable Unit Identifier, AEMO's internal code for a generator). For Western Australia's WEM grid, the registry comes from OpenElectricity.

Where the coordinates come from

AEMO's registry doesn't include GPS coordinates. We match each station by name to the WRI Global Power Plant Database, an open dataset of ~35,000 power plants worldwide maintained by the World Resources Institute. For stations not in WRI, we fall back to OpenElectricity coordinates, then a small manually curated table.

What the live output numbers mean

NEM live MW figures come from AEMO NEMWeb Dispatch SCADA. SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) is the real-time telemetry feed that every NEM generator sends to AEMO every 5 minutes as part of dispatch. Each reading is at the DUID level; we aggregate to station level.

WEM (Western Australia) uses a different source: the AEMO WA infographic generation CSV, which publishes per-facility output at 30-minute intervals in near-real-time as each trading interval closes. WEM's SCADA endpoint exists but is a daily batch file delayed ~1 day, so the infographic CSV is used instead. This means WEM output figures are coarser and slightly less fresh than NEM's 5-minute dispatch data.

Emissions data

Annual Scope 1 greenhouse gas emissions come from NGER (National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting), Australia's mandatory annual emissions disclosure scheme for large facilities. The dataset used is for the 2023–24 financial year.

Assumptions & limitations

Station matching relies on fuzzy name normalization — generic industry words (power, station, farm, wind, solar, battery, renewable, storage, facility, energy, and 40+ others) are stripped from both sides before comparison, with fuel-type compatibility checks as a guard — so there's a small risk of mismatches for stations with very similar names. A handful of newer stations may be missing from WRI if not yet added to the database. NEM output is refreshed every 5 minutes; WEM every 30 minutes. Both may lag by up to one dispatch interval. NGER emissions are annual averages, not real-time.

What AIS is

AIS (Automatic Identification System) is a radio broadcast standard that every commercial vessel over 300 gross tonnes is legally required to operate under the IMO SOLAS Convention. Ships transmit on two VHF frequencies (161.975 MHz and 162.025 MHz), broadcasting their GPS position, speed, course, heading, and navigational status. Each vessel has a globally unique MMSI (Maritime Mobile Service Identity) — a 9-digit number assigned by the vessel's flag state, similar to a phone number.

Two distinct broadcast types matter for us. Position Reports (AIS Messages 1–3) carry GPS, speed, course, and heading and are broadcast every 2–10 seconds for moving vessels, every 3 minutes for anchored vessels. Static & Voyage Data (Message 5) carries the vessel's name, IMO number, call sign, ship type code, physical dimensions, destination port, draught, and ETA — but is only broadcast every 6 minutes. This asymmetry means position data is abundant while identity and destination data is sparse in any short observation window.

How we receive the data

We subscribe to AIS Stream, a WebSocket service that aggregates AIS signals from both coastal shore stations and low-Earth-orbit satellites. Terrestrial AIS receivers have a line-of-sight range of roughly 40–50 nautical miles from shore; satellite AIS extends coverage to the open ocean but with slightly higher message loss in congested shipping lanes where multiple vessels broadcasting in the same time slot can collide.

Collection and storage

An automated job runs every ~30 minutes (planned reduction to hourly), opening a 75-second listening window on the AIS Stream WebSocket. It filters for vessels within the Australian EEZ bounding box (approximately 10°S–44.5°S, 112°E–154.5°E) and collects both position reports and static data messages. A typical run captures 80–140 raw position reports covering 20–30 classified energy and bulk vessels, plus 20–30 static data messages.

All collected data is written to a Postgres database. Position snapshots are stored as a time series (one row per vessel per run). A separate metadata table accumulates the best-known static data for each vessel across all runs — because any single 75-second window only captures Message 5 broadcasts from a fraction of vessels, the metadata table is designed to fill in over time: each run preserves existing non-null values and only overwrites a field when fresher data arrives. After several hours of collection, most regularly seen vessels have complete destination, IMO, dimension, and ship type data even though no individual window captured all of it.

How ships are classified

Ships are filtered to five categories relevant to Australia's resource economy: LNG/gas, oil tanker, coal, iron ore, and bulk/mining. Everything else is excluded. Classification uses a four-step pipeline:

• Ship type code — the AIS type field (70–89) provides a base category. Type 84 = LNG/gas carrier, 80–89 = tankers, 70–79 = cargo/bulk.
• Destination port matching — the vessel's self-declared destination is matched (substring, case-insensitive) against 27 major Australian commodity and trade ports and their common abbreviations, UN/LOCODE codes, and geographic aliases (e.g. "Brisbane River", "Port Jackson", "Corio Bay"). Space-separated LOCODE variants (e.g. "AU NTL" for Newcastle) are also matched by collapsing whitespace before comparison. A bulk carrier bound for "PTHED" is reclassified from generic bulk to iron ore; one declaring "HAY PT" becomes coal.
• Name keywords — vessel names containing terms like "LNG", "GAS CARRIER", "TANKER", or "BULK" are used to refine or assign a category when the type code and destination are inconclusive.
• Proximity heuristic — vessels that still lack a category are checked against known mining ports. If a vessel is within 200 km and heading toward a port (or within 20 km and stationary), it inherits that port's primary commodity category.

Direction (approaching, departing, lateral, unknown) is determined by comparing the vessel's actual course over ground against the bearing to the nearest Australian port. A heading difference under 60° = approaching, over 120° = departing, between = lateral.

What's shown on the map

The map layer displays up to 300 vessels (most recent position per MMSI from the last 24 hours), with each marker colour-coded by category and a small direction pip (green = approaching, amber = departing, grey = lateral/unknown). Clicking a ship opens a popup with full metadata: name, MMSI, IMO number, call sign, ship type, speed, course, heading, draught, dimensions, declared destination, nearest Australian port and distance, navigational status, and last update time.

What's shown on the Ship Tracking page

The dedicated Ship Tracking page reads from the same database but presents fleet-level analytics rather than a spatial view: fleet composition by category, a detailed table of approaching energy vessels (with per-vessel staleness indicators), active ports ranked by vessel count, metadata quality metrics (% of vessels with destination, IMO, dimensions), movement summary by direction and category, and a completeness breakdown showing field coverage across all recent positions.

The page also exposes full pipeline transparency: every collection run in the last 48 hours is listed with message counts, static data quality (how many messages carried destination and IMO data, how many matched a vessel that also sent a position report), and any errors or warnings. An ingest health banner turns amber if the last successful collection was 2–6 hours ago, and red if it exceeds 6 hours, so connection problems are immediately visible.

Resilience to outages

AIS Stream connections can fail or return zero positions for extended periods. All queries use a 24-hour lookback window so the map and dashboard continue to show the last known positions even during prolonged outages. Individual vessel rows on the Ship Tracking page display a colour-coded "last seen" timestamp — green under 2 hours, amber at 2–6 hours, red beyond 6 hours — and very stale rows are visually dimmed so fresh and old data are easily distinguished.

Destination matching recognises three formats crews use in practice: free text (e.g. “PORT HEDLAND”, abbreviations like “PTH”), the UN/LOCODE standard (e.g. “AUPHE” for Port Hedland — “AU” being the ISO country code for Australia), and the combined departure › destination notation (e.g. “SGSIN>AUPHE”). Substring matching handles all three without any special parsing. IMO recommends UN/LOCODE but studies show roughly 40% of vessels still use free text, so both approaches are necessary.

What each vessel popup shows

Each ship marker opens a popup with the vessel's name, MMSI, IMO number, callsign, and AIS ship type. Navigation data — speed over ground, course, true heading, draught — comes from AIS PositionReport messages (broadcast every 2–10 seconds while under way). Navigational status is also from PositionReport: values include “Under way”, “At anchor”, “Moored”, and “Not under command”, among others. The Destination field comes from AIS ShipStaticData messages (broadcast every 6 minutes) — it is a free-text field self-declared by the crew and may be blank, abbreviated, or inaccurate. Dimensions (length, beam) also come from static data.

Departure port and loading-port origin (inferred)

AIS has no departure port field — the standard only broadcasts a destination. Two complementary methods infer where a vessel came from:

Method 1 — navigational status transitions. If a vessel was moored (status 5) or anchored (status 1) within 20 km of a known Australian port in the previous ingest run, and is now under way (status 0), we record that port as its Departed port. Covers Australian out-port departures only; vessels departing from foreign loading ports are not captured by this method.

Method 2 — destination voyage log. Every ingest run records a destination log entry for all oil tankers and LNG carriers in our geographic boxes, regardless of whether they currently have an Australian destination set. When a tanker is observed with destination “JEBEL ALI” in the Indian Ocean and later gains an Australian destination such as “PORT HEDLAND”, the previous log entry identifies Jebel Ali as the likely loading port. This matters for product estimation:

• Gulf-origin vessels (Ras Tanura, Ras al-Khair, Kharg Island, Ruwais) are predominantly crude oil or condensate.
• Refinery-hub-origin vessels (Singapore, Tanjung Langsat, Fujairah, Rotterdam) are predominantly finished products (diesel, jet fuel, petrol).
• Coverage gap: if a vessel was not seen in our boxes before it set its Australian destination (e.g., it was in the Atlantic or out of box range), no prior destination will be available.

The destination log also supplements Method 1 for Australian departures: when a vessel that was ≤ 100 km from its matched destination port changes to a non-Australian destination, a departure event is recorded — catching cases where navigational status was not observed transitioning.

AU-bound destination prediction

Tankers and LNG vessels in transit routinely leave their AIS destination blank, or set it to the loading port, until they are much closer to arrival. To surface these vessels early, the pipeline applies a bearing heuristic to every confirmed oil tanker and LNG carrier that has no declared Australian destination:

• ▲▲ High confidence — vessel type confirmed as tanker/LNG via static data, speed ≥ 7 knots, course over ground within 30° of the bearing to the nearest Australian port, and within 8,000 km.
• ▲ Medium confidence — same type and position constraints, but speed ≥ 5 knots and course within 45°.

Predicted vessels are shown in the tanker table with a gold badge and are retained in the database like any other tracked vessel. The prediction is purely geometric — it does not consult port schedules, voyage history, or cargo manifests. The main false-positive risk is tankers heading from the Middle East towards SE Asia, whose eastward track may briefly align with an Australian bearing; a confirmed destination field (once the vessel broadcasts it) automatically overrides the prediction.

Geographic coverage

We use 15 targeted bounding boxes in a single AIS Stream WebSocket subscription, covering approximately 49% of navigable waters and ~97% of Australian energy cargo route-miles. AIS Stream applies its delivery rate limit per bounding box, so 15 boxes yields ~3× the message throughput of the original 5-box design while covering the same geography more precisely:

• AU-NW — NW Australia: Pilbara iron ore & LNG (Port Hedland, Dampier, Wheatstone)
• AU-N — N Australia: Darwin LNG, Gulf of Carpentaria, Torres Strait, Timor Sea
• AU-E/S — East & South Australia: coal & bulk ports (Newcastle, Gladstone, Hay Point, Adelaide)
• IndOc-NW — Suez Canal, Red Sea, Bab-el-Mandeb, Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz
• IndOc-SW — Cape of Good Hope route, East Africa, Mozambique Channel
• IndOc-C — Central Indian Ocean main transit lane
• IndOc-NE — Bay of Bengal, Sri Lanka, Malacca approaches
• IndOc-SE — SW approaches to Australia, Christmas & Cocos Islands
• Malacca — Malacca Strait & Andaman Sea (world's busiest choke point)
• S.China — South China Sea corridor between Malacca and East Asia
• E.Asia — Japan, Korea, China coast, East China Sea, Yellow Sea
• Phil/Indo — Philippines, Indonesia, Lombok & Makassar Straits, Banda Sea
• N.Pac — North-Central Pacific: Japan–Americas transit, Hawaii approaches
• S.Pac — South Pacific & Coral Sea: Pacific Island routes, trans-Tasman
• E.Pac — Eastern Pacific: Americas return routes, Panama Canal approaches

Key choke points confirmed inside coverage: Strait of Hormuz, Suez Canal, Bab-el-Mandeb, Cape of Good Hope, Malacca Strait, Lombok Strait, Torres Strait. The Atlantic Ocean is not monitored — European-origin cargoes are invisible until they round the Cape or clear the Suez Canal.

Outside the EEZ, only vessels with a declared Australian UN/LOCODE or free-text destination are retained (inbound). Vessels that recently departed an Australian port (known fleet) are also retained to provide outbound visibility. Position history is kept for 60 days, enabling voyage track replay on the map (click any ship marker to see its track).

Assumptions & limitations

AIS can be deliberately disabled ("going dark"), which is illegal but does occur — vessels engaged in sanctions evasion, illegal fishing, or in conflict zones sometimes switch off their transponders. Type codes and destinations are self-declared by the vessel's crew and are sometimes incorrect, outdated, or left blank. The classification pipeline will occasionally miscategorise vessels, particularly those with generic type codes and no declared destination.

Each 75-second collection window is a statistical sample, not a census. The theoretical coverage is high for moving vessels (which broadcast every 2–10 seconds) but lower for anchored vessels (every 3 minutes). Vessels that enter and leave the bounding box between runs may be missed entirely. The automated collection schedule has natural jitter of ±5 minutes, so the actual cadence averages roughly 25–35 minutes rather than exactly 30. Metadata completeness (destination, IMO, dimensions) depends on how many runs have captured a vessel's Message 5 broadcast — newly appeared vessels may show incomplete data for several hours.

What the page shows

The Liquid Fuel Security page estimates Australia's petroleum product supply balance for gasoline (ULP) and diesel (AGO). It combines static baseline figures from official government statistics with real-time AIS vessel data to produce a rolling 45-day view: 14 days of history and a 30-day forward projection.

Consumption and supply baselines

National consumption rates are sourced from the DISER Australian Petroleum Statistics 2024 (Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources). The figures used are full-year 2024 national averages: approximately 24.3 ML/day for gasoline and 38.1 ML/day for diesel. Domestic refining output assumes the two remaining Australian refineries — Ampol Lytton (Queensland) and Viva Energy Geelong (Victoria) — together supply roughly 4.0 ML/day of refined products, split approximately 1.8 ML/day gasoline and 2.2 ML/day diesel.

What Australia's storage actually contains

Australia's ~21–24 day commercial stock is almost entirely finished refined products — petrol (ULP), diesel (AGO), and jet fuel — held at petroleum import terminals at major port cities. It is not crude oil. The two operating refineries, Ampol Lytton (Brisbane, ~110,000 b/d) and Viva Energy Geelong (~120,000 b/d), also hold crude oil feedstock on-site, but this refinery feedstock is separate from the commercial product stock figures and is not included in the baseline.

Major terminal hubs, with approximate combined storage capacity:

• Port Botany, Sydney (NSW) — ~900 ML. Operators: Vopak, Terminals Australia, Ampol. Products: ULP, diesel, jet fuel, LPG.
• Kwinana, Perth (WA) — ~600 ML. Built on the former BP Kwinana refinery site (closed 2012). Operators: Vopak, Terminals Australia. Products: ULP, diesel, jet fuel.
• Geelong (VIC) — ~500 ML. Viva Energy refinery and import terminal. Products: crude feedstock + refined products.
• Birkenhead, Adelaide (SA) — ~350 ML. Operators: Vopak, Terminals Australia. Products: ULP, diesel, jet fuel.
• Lytton, Brisbane (QLD) — ~350 ML. Ampol refinery and terminal. Products: crude feedstock + refined products.
• Yarraville / Coode Island, Melbourne (VIC) — ~400 ML. Operators: Vopak, Terminals Australia. Products: ULP, diesel.
• Darwin (NT) — ~150 ML. Strategic importance for Defence. Products: diesel, aviation turbine fuel.

All terminal locations are shown on the oil vessel map — orange squares for refineries, cyan diamonds for import-only terminals — with hover popups showing capacity, operators, and products.

Storage baseline and days-of-cover

The storage baseline (starting stock) is derived from IEA and DISER 2024 estimates of Australia's commercial product stockholdings: approximately 23 days of gasoline cover and 21 days of diesel cover. These are national figures and do not account for the geographic distribution of stocks across states and territories.

Australia's IEA minimum oil stockholding obligation is 90 days (of net imports). Australia meets this through a combination of ~21–24 days of physical domestic product stocks plus ticket-based offshore entitlements — contracts that give Australia a legal claim on stocks held in other IEA member countries. Separately, Australia's domestic Minimum Stockholding Obligation (MSO) under the Fuel Security Act 2021 sets a legal floor for physical stocks held by fuel importers: approximately 24 days of petrol and 21 days of diesel. The dashed reference line on the days-of-cover chart marks this domestic MSO floor.

Import volume estimation from AIS

Each approaching oil tanker visible in the AIS feed is assigned an estimated cargo volume based on its vessel beam (width), which is a reliable proxy for ship class. The mapping is:

• Beam ≥ 68 m → ULCC → ~3.0 M barrels
• Beam 58–67 m → VLCC → ~2.0 M barrels
• Beam 44–57 m → Suezmax → ~1.0 M barrel
• Beam 32–43 m → Aframax → ~700 k barrels
• Beam < 32 m → MR / Small Tanker → ~300 k barrels

One barrel is approximately 0.159 ML. To derive the contribution to a specific product, we apply a blended product fraction: 35% for gasoline, 45% for diesel. These fractions approximate the overall Australian import mix across both crude tankers (whose cargo is converted to products at Lytton and Geelong refineries) and product tankers (which carry already-refined fuel directly to import terminals). Because roughly 80% of Australian liquid fuel imports arrive as finished products rather than crude, and because we cannot reliably distinguish the two tanker types from AIS data alone, this blended fraction is an approximation — see Assumptions & Limitations below.

State breakdown

National consumption and in-transit volumes are allocated to states using shares derived from DISER state-level consumption data. Western Australia has a higher diesel share due to its mining sector; New South Wales and Victoria are larger gasoline markets by population. These shares are static — they do not adjust for seasonal variation or state-level stock build/drawdown.

How inbound tankers are identified

Deciding which approaching tankers should count as "inbound to Australia" is harder than it sounds — AIS destination fields are free-text, often blank, and sometimes misleading. The pipeline applies three rules in strict priority order:

1. Confirmed Australian destination — if the pipeline has matched the AIS destination field to a known Australian port code (e.g. "AU HED" for Port Hedland, "AU SYD" for Sydney), the vessel is counted as inbound. The only exception is a vessel confirmed to be in ballast (empty), which is excluded because it carries no product. Vessels where cargo status is unknown are still counted — roughly 80% of approaching tankers with a confirmed Australian destination lack draught data due to AIS broadcast timing.
2. Explicit foreign destination — if the AIS destination resolves to a foreign UN/LOCODE (e.g. "SG SIN" for Singapore, "CN SHA" for Shanghai), the vessel is excluded regardless of its heading. A valid LOCODE must have a country prefix and at least three characters for the port code to avoid false matches on short abbreviations.
3. Bearing model inside Australia's EEZ only — if the destination is blank or ambiguous and the vessel is within approximately 370 km of an Australian port (200 nautical miles — the boundary of Australia's exclusive economic zone), a bearing model is applied. It checks whether the vessel's course is pointed toward an Australian port within the expected angular tolerance. Cargo status is treated the same as Rule 1: laden, partial, and unknown are all accepted; only a vessel confirmed to be in ballast is excluded.

Cargo volume for the supply model uses load fractions of 100% for confirmed laden, 50% for partial, 80% for unknown status (conservative estimate), and 0% for ballast.

Assumptions & limitations

This page is an indicative model, not an authoritative supply forecast. Key limitations include: (1) AIS coverage is incomplete — some vessels in transit may not appear, and AIS can be deliberately disabled; (2) cargo status (laden vs. ballast) is estimated from vessel draught relative to beam, which has a classification error rate of roughly 10–15%; (3) the storage baseline assumes a steady-state draw from the 2024 average — actual storage levels are not reported in real time; (4) the product fraction applied to all inbound tanker cargo (35% gasoline, 45% diesel) is a blended approximation that does not distinguish crude tankers from product tankers — in practice roughly 80% of Australia's liquid fuel imports arrive as finished products (not crude for refining), meaning the contribution of any individual product tanker carrying straight diesel, for example, is understated relative to a 100%-diesel cargo; (5) terminal capacity figures are approximate public estimates and do not represent real-time stock levels; (6) ETA calculations assume constant speed at the most recently observed rate, which may differ from actual arrival timing by 12–48 hours for vessels in transit.

The two-tier approach

Fire data combines official agency perimeter polygons (when available and fresh) with satellite-derived hotspot clusters as a fallback. Official polygons come from NSW RFS Major Incidents, VIC Emergency Management Victoria, and the WA DFES Warnings API. QLD, SA, NT, and TAS rely on hotspot-derived polygons as those agencies don't publish equivalent feeds.

How satellites detect fire

Hotspot data comes from NASA FIRMS (Fire Information for Resource Management System). Three VIIRS satellites (Suomi-NPP, NOAA-20, NOAA-21) orbit Earth at ~824 km altitude, each completing ~14 passes over Australia per day. Each satellite carries an infrared imaging sensor that scans the surface in a 3,040 km wide swath. When the mid-infrared brightness temperature of a 375 m × 375 m ground pixel is significantly hotter than the surrounding pixels, the algorithm flags it as an active fire. MODIS (aboard Terra and Aqua satellites) provides similar detection at 1 km resolution as a cross-check.

Fire Radiative Power (FRP)

FRP is the rate of radiant heat energy being emitted by a fire, measured in megawatts. A grass fire might register 5–20 MW; a large crown fire can reach thousands of MW. FRP is a proxy for fire intensity and biomass combustion rate — it correlates with smoke emission and is widely used in fire behaviour modelling.

Confidence levels

VIIRS uses categorical confidence: high (mapped to 90%), nominal (70%), low (40%). MODIS uses a numeric 0–100 scale. We filter out detections below 50% confidence to limit false alarms. Hot sunlit surfaces (e.g. bare metal roofing, desert outcrops in summer) can produce false detections at low confidence.

Industrial heat filtering

Steel mills, gas flares, and refineries appear as persistent hotspots on every satellite pass — at the exact same location, for months on end. The fire pipeline uses a 48-hour lookback window; industrial filtering extends this to 7 days. Any cluster meeting all three criteria is classified as an industrial source and displayed separately from fires:

• ≥5 individual hotspot detections
• All detections within 1.5 km of the cluster centroid
• Detections spanning ≥18 hours (temporally persistent)

The clustering uses a tight DBSCAN pass (ε = 1.0 km, minPts = 5) before applying the spatial/temporal tests, to handle large industrial complexes like steelworks that span ~2 km but are still a single fixed-point emitter.

Assumptions & limitations

Cloud cover blocks satellite detection entirely — Australia's monsoon season degrades northern fire coverage significantly. Fires under dense tree canopy may be partially missed. Hotspot-derived polygon areas are rough estimates based on point clustering (DBSCAN, ε = 2.5 km, minPts = 3), not actual burn boundaries. NSW, VIC, and WA official polygons update when the agency publishes, typically every few hours. NASA FIRMS files update every ~10 minutes.

Site database

A curated static dataset of Australia's major industrial facilities, covering steel mills, aluminium smelters, alumina refineries, copper/zinc/lead/nickel smelters, cement plants, chemical and fertiliser plants, phosphate facilities, and coal export terminals. Each site has operator, state, and operational status (active, care & maintenance, planned, closed). The data is manually compiled and is not a live registry — it reflects the state of the industry at the time of last update.

Emissions data — two sources

Where available, facility-level emissions come from the CER Safeguard Mechanism covered emissions data for FY 2022–23. The Safeguard Mechanism covers 219 large industrial facilities that each emit ≥100,000 tonnes CO₂e per year, with a total covered emissions of ~138.7 Mt CO₂e — mandatory government reporting, so these numbers are statutory figures rather than estimates. For facilities not covered by Safeguard (smaller sites, or those with missing entries), emissions are filled from the Climate Trace API, which provides satellite and modelling-based estimates as a static snapshot (retrieved March 2026 — not a live API call). The popup on each facility shows which source is being used.

Industrial heat signals (satellite)

When the Industry layer is fully active, persistent thermal hotspots are overlaid from the same NASA FIRMS VIIRS pipeline used by the Fires layer. These are the clusters identified as fixed-point industrial sources — steel mills, gas flares, refineries — based on 7 days of orbital passes showing spatially compact (within 1.5 km radius) and temporally persistent (≥18 hour span) detections at the same location. Shown as red triangles at each confirmed industrial heat source. FRP (Fire Radiative Power in MW) and detection count are shown in the popup.

Assumptions & limitations

Site list is static — new facilities or closures since last update will not appear. Safeguard emissions are for FY 2022–23; the most recent full year available. Emissions figures are for the whole facility, not split by process or product. Climate Trace estimates carry wider uncertainty than statutory Safeguard figures. Industrial heat signals depend on cloud-free VIIRS passes; heavily cloud-covered periods may produce incomplete coverage.

Basin polygons

Approximate outlines of Australia's major sedimentary petroleum basins, with status (producing, development, exploration), resource type (gas, oil, oil & gas, coal seam gas, gas condensate), major fields, and operators. Sources are Geoscience Australia, NOPTA (National Offshore Petroleum Titles Administrator), and the Australian Energy Resource Assessment 2024. These are drawn as approximate display polygons, not exact regulatory survey boundaries.

Pipelines

A static linestring dataset of major gas transmission pipelines — including the Dampier–Bunbury Natural Gas Pipeline (DBNGP), Eastern Gas Pipeline, South West Queensland Pipeline, and others — with operator, length, and daily throughput capacity where known.

LNG terminals & oil refineries

LNG export facilities and oil refineries are drawn from the same curated industry site database as the Industry layer, filtered to those categories. Popup cards show capacity (Mtpa for LNG, barrels/day for oil refineries, TJ/day for onshore gas plants), number of processing trains, feedstock, equity partner breakdown, and emissions (Safeguard or Climate Trace, same methodology as the Industry layer).

Assumptions & limitations

All data is static. Basin outlines are for orientation — do not use for regulatory or title research. Pipeline routes are approximate centrelines; exact alignments are not published. Facility capacities reflect nameplate design capacity, not actual throughput.

Three layers in one

The Floods layer combines three independent data sources rendered on top of each other: a NASA satellite raster showing actual inundation extent, BOM warning zone polygons, and a river network overlay for spatial context.

NASA GIBS — VIIRS Combined Flood 3-Day (satellite raster)

The primary visual layer is a live satellite raster from NASA GIBS (Global Imagery Browse Services), serving the VIIRS Combined Flood 3-Day product. Multiple VIIRS satellites (Suomi-NPP, NOAA-20, NOAA-21) each make ~14 passes over Australia per day; NASA composites 3 days of passes into a single classification layer to minimise gaps from cloud cover. Each 375 m pixel is classified into one of four states:

Flood (shown red) — surface that is inundated and was not water prior to the event. Possible flood (yellow) — likely inundated but with lower confidence, often due to partial cloud obscurement or marginal spectral signal. Permanent / seasonal water (cyan) — rivers, lakes, reservoirs that are always or normally wet. Cloud / no data (faint grey) — pixel obscured; no determination possible.

NASA classifies pixels by comparing multi-spectral reflectance signatures — water strongly absorbs near-infrared and reflects little back, making flooded pixels spectrally distinct from dry land. The 3-day composite means the raster updates once per day with approximately a 1-day latency. No API key is required; tiles are served via open WMS.

BOM Warnings — catchment zone polygons

Overlaid on the raster are polygon outlines from BOM's Warnings API. BOM issues warnings when their forecasting system — which fuses river and rain gauges (10,000+ across Australia), weather radar, and Himawari geostationary satellite rainfall estimates — indicates a catchment will flood. Catchment boundary polygons come from BOM's ArcGIS FeatureServer. We only display Major and Emergency warnings — the two tiers where significant inundation is occurring or imminent. (Full scale: Watch → Minor → Moderate → Major → Emergency.)

River network

A river network overlay is drawn from a bundled Australian rivers GeoJSON at low zoom, switching to Mapbox's waterway vector tiles at higher zoom. Rivers and streams are highlighted when clicked, with an animated flow dash to show direction.

Assumptions & limitations

The satellite raster is optical/spectral — cloud cover blocks it. The 3-day composite reduces gaps but a sustained overcast period (common during east-coast flood events) can still leave large areas classified as "no data". The raster has ~1 day latency, so a rapidly developing flood may not yet be visible in the satellite layer even though BOM has issued a warning. The BOM polygon is the warning catchment area, not the actual flooded footprint — it covers the whole zone under warning, which is typically much larger than the inundated land. BOM severity is parsed from message text (not a metadata field) so text format changes can break severity detection. Warnings refreshed every 10 minutes; satellite tiles refreshed daily.

Sources

Three feeds are combined: BOM Warnings (primary source for systems in Australia's Area of Responsibility — roughly 80°E to 175°E, south to 50°S), GDACS (Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System, maintained by the European Commission — supplements BOM for storms outside the Australian region), and the BOM 7-Day TC Outlook (developing tropical lows and disturbances not yet at cyclone intensity, with probability-of-cyclone forecasts out to 7 days).

The Australian cyclone category scale

Australia uses a 5-category scale based on 10-minute sustained wind speed — this is different from the US Saffir-Simpson scale which uses 1-minute winds: Cat 1: 63–88 km/h (gales, minor damage), Cat 2: 89–117 km/h (destructive winds, significant damage), Cat 3: 118–159 km/h (very destructive, severe structural damage — "severe cyclone" threshold), Cat 4: 160–199 km/h (devastating damage), Cat 5: ≥200 km/h (extreme devastation, catastrophic). Note: BOM's Cat 3–5 maps roughly to Saffir-Simpson Cat 2–5, so Australian categories aren't directly comparable to Atlantic/Pacific classifications you may see in international coverage.

Track data

For active BOM warnings, the track (past positions and forecast path) is extracted from the GeoJSON embedded in BOM's warning detail. For the 7-day outlook, the "confidence area" polygons show where the disturbance centre is forecast to be at 12-hour intervals — these widen rapidly beyond 48 hours as forecast uncertainty grows.

Assumptions & limitations

Track forecasts are probabilistic guidance, not a guaranteed path. For BOM warnings, wind speed and category are extracted by regex from advisory text — if BOM's format changes, category parsing may break. For GDACS, wind speed is a structured data field (not text-parsed) and is generally more reliable, but GDACS track data may be incomplete for weaker systems. The 7-day outlook entries carry no wind speed or category data at all.

De-duplication is partial: BOM outlook entries are suppressed by name once a BOM warning exists for the same storm. GDACS storms are excluded from the Australian region by geographic bounding box, but are not de-duplicated by name — in rare cases, a storm crossing the boundary may briefly appear in both feeds.

Source

A curated static dataset of 27 major Australian commodity and trade ports — including Port Hedland, Dampier, Hay Point, Gladstone, Newcastle, Brisbane, Sydney/Port Botany, Geelong, Mackay, Weipa, Bunbury, and others — with each port's location, state, primary commodity category, and common AIS destination aliases. The port list serves a dual role: it drives the Mining Ports map layer and is the reference table used by the Ships & Ship Tracking pipeline to classify vessels by destination, determine approach/departure direction, and calculate nearest-port distances.

Port categories

Each port has a primary commodity assignment: iron ore (Port Hedland, Cape Lambert, Dampier, Geraldton, Whyalla), coal (Newcastle, Hay Point, Abbot Point, Gladstone, Port Kembla), LNG/gas (Pluto LNG, Wheatstone LNG, Darwin LNG, Curtis Island LNG), and bulk/mining (Esperance, Fremantle, Port Adelaide, Townsville). These categories propagate into the ship classification pipeline — a vessel heading to a coal port is classified as a coal carrier.

Assumptions & limitations

Static data — port capacities and commodity handling change over time and may not reflect current operations. Some ports handle multiple commodity types (e.g. Gladstone exports both coal and LNG) but are assigned a single primary category for classification purposes, which may occasionally misclassify vessels at multi-commodity ports.

Source

A static GeoJSON file of Australia's major private heavy-haul railways — primarily the Pilbara iron ore lines (BHP, Rio Tinto, FMG networks), the Bowen Basin coal rail corridors, and other resource-dedicated lines not shown on standard transport maps. These railways are private infrastructure, not part of the national public rail network, and are not published by government transport agencies.

Assumptions & limitations

Static data compiled from public sources including satellite imagery tracing and published company infrastructure disclosures. Routes are approximate centrelines. No live train movement data is available or shown.

What we're tracking

FIFO (Fly-In Fly-Out) operations are a dominant feature of Australian mining — workers commute by air between capital cities and regional hubs rather than living near mine sites. We track commercial and charter aircraft whose routes touch known mining hub airports (Pilbara, Goldfields, Bowen Basin, NW QLD, NT/Gulf, SA outback, NSW mining belt).

How ADS-B works

ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast) is the aviation equivalent of AIS. Aircraft transponders broadcast a 1090 MHz radio signal every ~0.5 seconds containing the aircraft's ICAO24 code (unique 24-bit identifier), GPS position, altitude, speed, and heading. Unlike radar, it requires no interrogation — it's a continuous broadcast. Ground stations and an increasing number of satellites pick up these signals and relay them to aggregators.

OpenSky Network is an open, academic non-profit that aggregates ADS-B from thousands of volunteer receiver stations globally. We use their API for authenticated access to the full Australian airspace snapshot. If OpenSky is unavailable, we fall back to the ADS-B LOL community feed, a crowd-sourced alternative.

How routes are inferred

Aircraft don't broadcast their flight plan via ADS-B — only their current position and heading. We filter to Australian-registered aircraft (originCountry = "Australia") that are airborne and travelling at least 55 m/s (~107 knots) to exclude taxiing, holding-pattern, or hovering signals.

For each qualifying aircraft we calculate the bearing from its position to every tracked mining hub airport, then compare that to the aircraft's actual heading. Confidence tiers:

• High — heading within 22° of airport bearing AND within 700 km
• Medium — within 40° AND within 1,200 km; or no heading data available but within 60 km of the airport

At least one endpoint (origin or destination) must be a mining hub for the flight to appear. Up to 120 flights are tracked at a time; once the cap is reached, lower-scoring candidates are dropped (score = distance + heading delta × 6, lower is better).

Assumptions & limitations

Route inference is probabilistic — some general aviation or charter flights will appear that aren't FIFO operations. Aircraft seating capacity is estimated from the ICAO type code (e.g. B737 ≈ 162 seats) — actual load factor is unknown. OpenSky coverage is thinner in remote areas; some aircraft may not appear if no receiver is in range. Refresh cadence is 20 seconds.

Site database

Mine site locations and metadata come from a curated static database keyed by Geoscience Australia mine ID, covering active and historical mine sites across Australia with operator, primary commodity, and production status. Processing and enrichment data (ore grades, processing method, production volumes) is sourced from the Mudd minerals dataset, a peer-reviewed academic compilation of Australian mine production history.

Emissions data

Where a mine appears in the CER Safeguard Mechanism 2022–23 dataset (mines emitting ≥100,000 t CO₂e/yr), those statutory Scope 1 emissions are shown on the mine popup. This covers large operations like Olympic Dam, BHP Mitsubishi Alliance coal mines, Bowen Basin operations, and major WA gold mines.

Assumptions & limitations

Static data — new mines, closures, or ownership changes since last update will not be reflected. Commodity prices shown alongside mines are spot prices from the commodity prices feed (see below), not mine-specific contract prices or realised revenues. Safeguard emissions are FY 2022–23; smaller mines below the 100,000 t threshold do not have reported emissions shown.

What is shown

125 major Australian data centre facilities across all eight states and territories — operational, under construction, and publicly announced planned sites. Coverage spans wholesale colocation campuses, cloud hyperscale deployments, government-classified secure facilities, retail colocation, and key enterprise sites. Small server rooms and retail edge nodes are not included.

Where the data comes from

This is a curated static dataset compiled from publicly available sources. Each entry links directly to the operator's own facility page (via the “Operator source” link in the popup). Key operators covered include:

• NEXTDC — ASX-listed operator; capacity and commissioning years from annual reports and investor presentations.
• AirTrunk (BlackRock) — campus locations and headline capacity from company website and press releases.
• Equinix — International Business Exchange (IBX) locations from the Equinix data centre finder.
• CDC Data Centres — Eastern states and ACT campus details from company disclosures and government contracts.
• DigiCo Infrastructure (formerly HMC Capital) — campus locations and capacity from company announcements.
• Digital Realty, STACK Infrastructure, Keppel, Vantage — wholesale colo campuses; capacity and timelines from company websites and press releases.
• Hyperscale cloud regions (AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle) — region presence confirmed via provider documentation; capacity not publicly disclosed.
• Regional and government operators (DXN, DCI, iseek, DC Two, Vocus, Telstra, state government data centres) — locations from company and government disclosures.

Coordinates are approximate. For campuses with multiple closely spaced buildings, a single representative point is used.

How size and colour work

Each circle is coloured by build status: cyan = operational, amber = under construction, violet = planned. Circle radius scales with rated IT load capacity in MW (sqrt scaling so the largest sites don't dominate the map). Sites where capacity is not publicly disclosed use a small default radius.

Power supply

Each popup shows the known power supply arrangement — the electricity grid connection and any publicly disclosed renewable energy contract or PPA (Power Purchase Agreement). Most large operators have committed to 100% renewable energy matching via LGC (Large-scale Generation Certificates) or direct PPAs with wind and solar generators. Specific counterparty names are rarely disclosed publicly. ACT-based facilities benefit from the ACT Government's 100% renewable electricity scheme, which contracts directly with wind and solar generators on behalf of territory consumers.

Assumptions & limitations

Capacity figures are rated IT load (the power drawn by servers and storage), not the facility's total power draw (which is higher by a factor of PUE, typically 1.2–1.5). Data is updated manually — new announcements or capacity expansions may not be reflected immediately. Planned facilities may be cancelled or delayed; under-construction timelines are estimates from public disclosures. Hyperscale cloud regions do not disclose capacity, so their circles reflect only presence, not scale.

Source

Commodity prices are static research estimates based on TradingEconomics data. 17 commodities are covered: Gold, Silver, Copper, Zinc, Iron Ore, Coal, Uranium, PGEs (platinum group), Cobalt, Diamonds, Lead, Lithium, Manganese, Nickel, Rare Earths, Tin, and Tungsten. Most prices are as of February 2026; Diamonds uses a Q1 2025 estimate and Tungsten a December 2025 estimate (both thinly traded with infrequent public price data).

This is not a live feed — prices are indicative only and will drift from market rates over time. A live commodity price feed is on the roadmap.