Leveraging Data To Optimize Shipping Through The Panama Canal While Protecting Local Water Supply

The Panama Canal, a 51-mile waterway connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, is considered the most vital piece of infrastructure for the transport of international trade in the Western Hemisphere.

This trans-oceanic corridor, which reduces vessel travel time between New York and San Francisco by more than half, supports 6% of global maritime trade as a primary route connecting North Asia and the East and Gulf Coasts of the United States. In 2003 alone, 14,000 vessels transited the Panama Canal, carrying more than 500 million tons of cargo.

The Panama Canal’s lock system is reliant on water from the Chagres River, which is stored in two manmade lakes: Gatun and Alajuela. Water from the lakes fills a series of locks that lift ships 85 feet above sea level to Gatun Lake and lowers them on the other side, allowing vessels to move freely between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean.

Managing the water levels in Gatun and Alajuela Lakes is critical to the Panama Canal’s function with a single vessel transit using 52 million gallons of fresh water and an average of 36 ships transiting the Canal per day. Maintaining sufficient water levels is also critical for the 2.5 million residents of Panama City and Colón who depend on the Chagres River for their drinking water and municipal wastewater treatment. Hydropower is generated in Gatun and Alhajuela, mostly for internal Canal operations.

The balancing act of maintaining optimal lake levels is carried out by the Panama Canal Authority (PCA). The agency accomplishes this by collecting and leveraging vast amounts of data, which is used for hydrological modeling and forecasting, to support strategies to economize the use of a finite resource.

Scattered across the watersheds, 55 scientific stations collect information related to precipitation, water temperature, wind speeds, dewpoint, humidity, tides, water levels, and runoff. The PCA consolidates this raw data, along with S-band weather radar information in Aquarius, a software platform, that acquires, organizes, models, and assures data quality before publishing in real-time.