Geospatial Consulting Group International, LLC (geocgi) has recently completed the Waterway Analysis Management System (WAMS) project for the United States Coast Guard (USCG), and we’re excited to share some of our team’s accomplishments. WAMS consists of four interconnected web applications: Waterway Health, Waterway Performance, Waterway Trends & Analysis, and Waterway Design. We designed, developed, and deployed Module 3: Trends & Analysis, and Module 4: Waterway Design. Modules 1, 2, and 3 are tabular data views and connected microservices, while Module 4, Waterway Design, features an interactive Angular Webmap with integrated custom JavaScript tools and workflows. (Waterway Health is in development by a partner company.)
Figure 1: Landing page of the Waterway Design Module displayed after selecting a waterway.
The Waterway Design Module supports the Coast Guard Marine Transportation and System Management Mission, which works to ensures safe, secure, and environmentally sound waterway conditions within the United States. A central pillar of this mission is the Aids to Navigation (ATON) program, which maintains the buoys, lighthouses, and electronic beacons that guide personnel and commercial vessels through national waters. The Coast Guard must ensure each ATON is in its assigned location, inspected for safety and function, transmitting data (for those that have communication functionality) and is suitable for the environmental conditions in which it was placed. Currently, there are nearly 45,000 federal ATON existing in America’s waters.
In addition to ATON maintenance, the Coast Guard is responsible for determining if the collective ATON within a waterway are adequately guiding vessels along that river or body of water. That is where Waterway Design comes in: this module operates at the waterway level, allowing Coast Guard stakeholders to visualize where ATON are within a waterway. Nearly all workflows begin with the user selecting a waterway within the reactive central map for analysis. Once a waterway is selected, users can begin one of two workflows: Adding, removing, or repositioning ATON within the waterway, or calculating the coverage of ATON within a waterway by percent of surface area.
Geocgi developers used JavaScript within an Angular framework to power the ATON Editing Workflow with a suite of custom tools. After selecting a waterway, users place a new ATON on the map and complete a semi-auto filled webform to populate its attributes. Once the form is submitted, they can continue adding ATON or repositioning and removing existing ATON. All changes are stored in a custom scratchpad, ensuring no updates are written to the USCG ATON database during these design sessions.
Once users are satisfied with the number and placement of ATON in a selected waterway, they can run one of the Calculate Coverage tools. Behind the scenes, each ATON is buffered based on its visibility range—daytime, nighttime, or radar reflective beacon distance (where available). The combined buffered area is then compared to the total surface area of the waterway and displayed as a percentage (e.g., “ATON coverage of the Lower Potomac River is X% during daylight”). Users can recalculate coverage after adding, moving, or removing ATON, and instantly see the updated percentage along with the change from the previous result.
Experienced mariners may quickly notice a limitation of the Calculate Coverage tool: most navigators focus on the deeper, navigable channel rather than the entire waterway surface. To address this, the Waterway Design Module includes a Channel Coverage tool. Where U.S. Army Corps of Engineers channel framework data are available, this tool performs the same calculation process but focuses only on the channel. It displays the percentage of channel surface area covered by visible ATON during the day and night, as well as coverage provided by remote sensing equipment.
Figure 2: USACE Project Channel with 100% channel coverage results.
The default basemap in the Waterway Design Module is the NOAA Electronic Navigation Chart, providing users with a familiar and authoritative reference.
As part of the ATON Editing workflow, users must consider key factors such as whether an ATON will be placed in fresh or salt water and the weather conditions it will need to withstand. On the Atlantic coast, for example, tropical storms play a major role in these decisions. To support this analysis, the WAMS team incorporated 80 years of NOAA National Hurricane Center tropical storm trackline data to identify each sector’s 10- and 40-year storms where applicable. These storm intensities display on-screen for each selected waterway, and users can toggle the tracklines on or off.
To keep the data accurate and the system future-proof, the team developed an update tool that connects to NOAA’s API, downloads and formats the latest trackline data, and saves the results in an Excel file listing each AOI’s 10- and 40-year storm. Updates will be performed at the end of every other hurricane season to ensure the data remains current.
Figure 3: Hurricane tracklines representing 10-and 40-year storms for a selected waterway. Color changes correlate to the changes in the Saffir-Simpon storm intensity.
Amongst the additional data included the Waterway Design module, the team processed and developed vessel traffic density rasters for the largest 40 ports in the US. These raster views create a comprehensive workflow allowing decision makers to compare ATON placement to actual waterway use patterns.
The existing government data was low-resolution enough to show vessels sailing into bridges, jetties, and sand-spits, making it unsuitable for navigational planning purposes. Our goal was to create an annual, high-resolution vessel density traffic raster for all commercial vessels, as well as a separate category for each commercial vessel type. (I.e., tankers, tow boats, fishing vessels.)
Processing the historic vessel position data was one of the WAMS team’s biggest technical challenges. The dataset was incredibly valuable but massive—just one year of vessel location points across U.S. waters contained over 2 billion records. Early test runs revealed that creating high-resolution vessel density maps would take months, even after upgrading the processing server’s hardware.
To solve this, the team consulted with Esri’s GeoAnalytics group, who recommended licensing Esri’s GeoAnalytics Engine, a Big Data solution built to run on Apache Spark. Spark distributes processing loads across clusters, making it ideal for handling such large datasets. The development team successfully deployed a local Spark environment and used it to cluster-process billions of raw AIS vessel points. As a result, the WAMS modules now include raster layers showing both overall commercial traffic density and density by vessel type for the nation’s 40 largest ports. USCG decision-makers are now able to toggle between two years’ datasets, comparing how vessel traffic has changed over time. The traffic density rasters are integrated into WAMS as a whole, allowing for easy comparison between present ATON configurations and the most recent vessel traffic rasters available. In addition, our development team developed the raster imagery at a 20-meter scale, a much higher-resolution product than the current government rasters at 100m resolution.
Figure 4: 2022 tanker traffic within the Port of Los Angeles-Long Beach. The data highlights idle vessels, shown as green circles, as they wait for their turn to offload.
Within the Waterway Design Module, users can toggle traffic density rasters on and off, revealing high-resolution insights into real-world vessel traffic patterns. These insights help the Coast Guard distribute ATON resources more efficiently, supporting safer and more effective navigation. The WAMS team has also integrated additional geospatial datasets from federal agencies, including storm surge predictions and environmentally protected areas, to help the Coast Guard design and maintain ATON networks sustainably.
Finally, we developed the Trends and Analysis Structure Assessment Report, a highly filterable web table that consolidates maintenance and replacement data for every ATON across U.S. waters. This tool gives Coast Guard decision-makers a clear, centralized view of how many ATON need repair or replacement in the next 1-, 3-, and 5-year budget cycles. All relevant information is displayed in one place with red-highlighted alerts, and users can drill down by geographic Area of Responsibility or by any column in the table for detailed analysis.
The WAMS project was delivered on time and on budget, thanks to the team’s Agile development approach, surge staffing, and close collaboration with Coast Guard stakeholders. What began as scattered ideas and datasets just two years ago is now a suite of fully functional web applications equipped with custom maintenance tools designed to future-proof both the applications and their data. The live WAMS modules have already been demonstrated to the international maritime community, and we look forward to continuing to support the Coast Guard in enhancing their waterway management capabilities.
For more information about this project, please reach out to our Waterway Analysis Management Systems Project Manager, Christine Johnson, christine.e.johnson@geocgi.com.