Daily transit activity

Standing status

Day by day

The days themselves, rather than one standing figure. A waterway’s traffic is read against the days actually held for it — a stalled feed shows its last known level rather than an empty window, which would read as a collapse that never happened.

Hormuz inbound and outbound

The Gulf has one maritime entrance, so cargo leaving its ports must pass Hormuz outbound and cargo arriving must have passed it inbound. That split says something a transit count cannot: outbound tanker tonnage falling while inbound holds is a statement about export capacity, not about traffic in general. Ports reporting is shown on every row, because a fall in tonnage and a fall in coverage look identical without it.

Radar coverage

Every count above is AIS-derived, and AIS is self-reported — a vessel with its transponder off does not appear in it. At Hormuz that gap is measurable, not theoretical. Radar is indifferent to what a ship broadcasts and sees through cloud and darkness, so this states when each strait was last imaged and what is available to look at. It does not say what is in the imagery: detecting vessels means processing gigabyte products, which is why the scene size is shown rather than a count nobody ran.

Thermal activity

Radar says whether a strait was imaged; this says whether anything beside it is burning. The count of detections is not the reading — over Hormuz it is dominated by the Bandar Abbas flare stack, and over Malacca by field burning ashore, so a total would rank straits by how much industry sits next to them. What separates a flare from an event is persistence: infrastructure burns in the same place nightly, and a vessel fire or a struck terminal appears where there was nothing. Both figures are shown, and every hotspot links to the NASA imagery for the day it burned.