Weather Routing Systems for Maritime Navigation
Date:
In this talk, David Gómez-Ullate provided a comprehensive overview of the potential benefits and existing challenges of weather routing systems for maritime navigation. While sea transportation is the most efficient way to move goods worldwide, its exponential increase in volume in recent decades poses significant environmental challenges. Maritime shipping alone accounts for 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions, prompting the International Maritime Organization to impose drastic decarbonization measures on this sector. As a response, considerable research is focusing on alternative fuels (e.g., green hydrogen) and more efficient propulsion system designs. These measures require substantial investment and will yield results in the medium to long term.
Conversely, intelligent utilization of climatic factors can achieve significant savings with nearly zero investment and much quicker deployment. The challenge of finding optimal routes for maritime transportation is complex and multidisciplinary, involving mathematicians, computer scientists, meteorologists, naval engineers, economists, and data scientists. We provided a brief introduction to this problem, transferring detailed explanations of the mathematical approach to some of the talks contributed in the session.
You can watch the talk here: video.
The research for this project is funded by BBVA Foundation and Agencia Estatal de Investigación.