U.S. Department of Commerce Economic Development Administration (EDA)

SmartPort

Duration:
Ongoing

The Challenge

With grants from The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Agency, the State of Louisiana and other partners, The Water Institute of the Gulf is developing a Lower Mississippi River SmartPort & Resilience Center (SmartPort).

Through the development of a decision support tool to forecast shoaling at port facilities along the Mississippi River, SmartPort will improve port operations and benefit a variety of stakeholders who need to understand how sediment builds up in the Mississippi River. This Real-Time Shoaling Forecast Tool will be coupled with a suite of weather, river, and road traffic analytics to improve efficiency and help the region’s ports become more resilient in the face of future natural disasters and economic shocks.

The Approach

Using an innovative crowd-sourced data gathering approach, The Water Institute has partnered with more than a dozen vessel operation companies to develop technology that transforms depth sounder readings into bathymetric maps. Nearly a billion depth observation readings have been gathered to date which are powering a machine learning model that will be used to develop the most up-to-date depth map of the Mississippi River channel currently available.

When completed, this new resource will be released to benefit a wide range of stakeholders who need to understand how sediment builds up in the Mississippi River channel. An RFQ to develop a web-based dashboard for port-level resilience planning was released in early June.