Updated 2026-10-23 02:52 UTC
Tanker Watch
A satellite and AIS watch on the anchorages and lanes where oil tankers gather. The pipeline is scheduled to check for new Sentinel-2 passes about every six hours and publish the vessels it can see. The update time above shows when this snapshot was built. A separate Fintraffic AIS receiver sample covers the northern Baltic, not the global chokepoints. Each satellite tile gets a new pass every few days, cloud permitting.
Tanker Watch AIS archive · Dated observations
Baltic AIS activity pulse
The latest archived sample recorded 56 tankers in the northern Baltic receiver network at 2026-10-23 02:52 UTC. Among 17 snapshots across 6 UTC calendar dates within the 168 hours ending at that sample, the observed range was 56–102 and the median was 68. These are observed reports, not a global tanker count or an oil-price forecast.
Receiver coverage and reporting can change; compare snapshots with their timestamps and source notes.
Chokepoints
What Tanker Watch does
Commercial ship-tracking services sell vessel positions built from dense networks of AIS receivers. Tanker Watch takes a different, open route. It reads free Sentinel-2 satellite imagery over a fixed set of anchorages, proposes the vessels it can see, and labels each one by shape and deck colour. The northern Baltic also has a Fintraffic AIS receiver sample. A satellite detection without a matching receiver report is not proof that its vessel switched off AIS: reception, timing and coverage can all explain a missing match.
The result is not a global fleet count. It is a consistent, repeatable sample of places that matter to oil supply, published with its limits stated, so changes over time can be read honestly.
Latest data downloads
The latest snapshot is free to download as CSV or JSON, together with EIA price history. Credit FXPM Labs when reusing its work. Commercial reuse of FXPM-produced data requires the API & Team plan. Read the data-use terms and source licences.
How to read these numbers
- Counts are automatic proposals from 10-metre Sentinel-2 imagery. The detector is not a validated classifier: a “likely tanker” is a hull whose shape and deck colour fit a tanker, not an identified ship.
- Cloud-covered water is not searched. A low count under cloud is missing data, not an empty anchorage.
- Each tile is a sample about 12 kilometres across. Scenes arrive every few days per tile, so “latest” can mean several days old. The capture time is shown on every card.
- Vessels seen by satellite carry no names. Matching them with AIS needs a receiver in range at the same time.
Method and source details are on the sources page of the map. Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data.