Maritime chokepoint monitoring for eighteen straits
WarWatch monitors eighteen maritime chokepoints — Hormuz, Malacca, Suez, Bab el-Mandeb, Panama, the Taiwan and Turkish straits and eleven more — with a sourced record of the goods that cross each one, a daily route-health score built from AIS transit counts against a 30-day baseline, the Cape-versus-Suez detour ratio, reported incidents inside the corridor, and a route-disruption alert when transits collapse.
Eighteen straits, seven always on the globe
Hormuz, Malacca, Suez, Bab el-Mandeb, Panama, the Taiwan Strait and the Turkish Straits are drawn at every zoom level. Gibraltar, Kerch, the Danish straits, Sunda, Lombok, Dover, Korea, Luzon, Makassar, the Mozambique Channel and the Cape of Good Hope appear as the camera lowers. Each opens the same monitor.
Goods crossing
Route health
Plants operating in the strait
Who depends on it
Incidents
Disruption alerts
How the daily score is built
- 01
Positions
AIS vessel positions are streamed continuously and stored with draught, destination and navigation status. - 02
Transits
Positions are matched to each corridor polygon and counted as daily transits. A corridor larger than half a million square kilometres is skipped with the reason printed. - 03
Baseline
Today's count is expressed as a z-score against the rolling 30-day mean, so every strait is measured against its own normal rather than a global one. - 04
Detour and dark gaps
The Cape-of-Good-Hope-versus-Suez ratio is computed as a routing signal; vessels that stop broadcasting inside a corridor are counted as dark gaps. - 05
Incidents
Geolocated conflict alerts inside the polygon are written as incidents against the corridor; route-disruption alerts are excluded so a strait cannot score its own output. - 06
Score
The components are combined with stated weights and stored with the coverage field. No model is involved at any step.
A strait is where conflict and trade meet
A reported strike near a corridor is one event on the conflict map. On the strait monitor it is also the incident that moves the day’s score, the reason a detour ratio may rise next week and the thing that sits beside the list of goods that will be delayed. WarWatch runs the corridor job and the asset-exposure job on the same alerts, one after the other, so a strait and a terminal on its shore cannot disagree about what happened today.
| Criterion | Map marker | Strait monitor |
|---|---|---|
| Says | A report placed here | What crosses here, how traffic is behaving, what is nearby |
| Time | Now, expiring in five hours | Today against the last 30 days, with history |
| Downstream | — | Goods by tonnage and world-trade share; producing countries; plants in reach |
| Notification | Alert-type rules | Chokepoint-transit rules and route-disruption alerts |
Who monitors chokepoints
- Shipping, logistics and procurement teams whose cargo uses one of these passages.
- Energy and commodity analysts reading Gulf, Red Sea and Malacca traffic against the reporting.
- Journalists covering a maritime crisis who need the goods-at-stake figures with their sources.
- Researchers who want a daily, component-level record rather than a headline.
The monitors are a premium feature. The corridors are drawn for everyone; the monitor’s figures and the health score sit behind the plan described on the pricing page.
What the monitor does not claim
Limitations
- AIS coverage varies by corridor and by receiver density; dark gaps are counted but cannot be explained by the data alone.
- A world-trade share is the share of trade in that one good, so the shares on a strait do not add up and should not be added.
- There is no per-vessel routing in the data; “plants operating in the strait” is a distance-and-goods link, not a shipping record.
- Transit volumes are transit, never production; nothing on a strait feeds a world-output total.
Corridors, goods and daily scores are also served by the API under chokepoints and route-health.
Frequently asked questions
- Can WarWatch track maritime chokepoints?
- Yes. Eighteen corridors are defined as polygons — IHO sea areas where they exist, operator boxes where not. Vessel positions from AIS are matched to each polygon, transits are counted daily and compared with a rolling 30-day baseline, and each corridor gets a route-health score whose components and weights are shown.
- What is a maritime chokepoint?
- A narrow passage that a large share of seaborne trade must use because the alternatives are much longer or do not exist: the Strait of Hormuz for Gulf oil and gas, Bab el-Mandeb and the Suez Canal for Asia–Europe traffic, Malacca for East Asian imports, Panama for Atlantic–Pacific transits. A disruption at one changes routes, costs and delivery times for goods far from the strait.
- What goods does each strait carry, and where do the figures come from?
- Each corridor holds a sourced record of the goods crossing it with a tonnage a year and, where published, the share of world trade in that good. Each row carries its own source and date. The share column does not add up by design: every good has its own denominator.
- What triggers a route-disruption alert?
- Two things: a transit collapse, when a corridor's daily count sits two standard deviations or more below its 30-day mean for two consecutive days, and a corridor incident, when a reported conflict event falls inside the corridor polygon. The alert appears on the map like any other, but is not attributed to any country — a strait is not a country.
- Does WarWatch show individual ships?
- No. It counts transits and reads the counts as a signal. AIS can be switched off, spoofed or out of receiver range, so a live picture of named vessels would claim more than the data supports.
Related resources
See the map
The live conflict map, the country dossiers and the intel feed are free to open. Premium adds critical alerts, the strait monitors, the supply-chain figures and the daily report by email.
WarWatch (war-watch.com) is a global conflict intelligence platform built on publicly available information: news wires, regional press, public OSINT feeds and open datasets. Conflict information changes quickly and early reports are often incomplete or later revised. Nothing on this site is a substitute for official security guidance, and no event shown here should be treated as independently confirmed unless a source says so.