Dover Strait — Daily Ship Transits

Methodology

The number of ships that transit the Dover Strait each day: container ships, dry bulk carriers, general cargo ships, roll-on/roll-off (ro-ro) ships and tankers. A transit is counted when a ship passes through the chokepoint's boundary. A passage that spans several days is counted once, and the same ship is not counted again within 48 hours. IMF PortWatch builds it from the Automatic Identification System (AIS) position signals that ships broadcast, as collected by the UN Global Platform, following Arslanalp, Koepke and Verschuur, "Tracking Trade from Space" (IMF Working Paper 2021/225). The series runs daily from 1 January 2019, with days in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). PortWatch adds new days about once a week, a few days behind, and may revise recent days as late signals arrive. Single days swing with ship arrivals, so totals over a week or a month show the trend more clearly. Values are as PortWatch publishes them (n_total, the sum of the five vessel types). They count ships, not cargo: a large tanker and a small general cargo ship count the same.

How we collect, check and project every dataset →

Source

International Monetary Fund, PortWatch, Daily Chokepoints Data (Dover Strait, chokepoint9), with the University of Oxford; AIS data from the UN Global Platform: https://portwatch.imf.org/datasets/3da2b9ca97684916b75c4013f95d18ab_0/about — figures as published on 16 October 2026.