Global Port Activity Monitoring

Summary

Global, repeated monitoring of port operations is increasingly relevant for supply-chain disruption tracking, but globally scalable methods must be explicit about what medium-resolution sensors can and cannot measure. This study develops and executes a fully reproducible Sentinel-2 + AIS framework for global port-activity monitoring using scientifically explicit proxy variables rather than unsupported fine-grained object counts. We process repeated Sentinel-2 Level-2A observations for a geographically distributed sample of 20 major ports and align image-derived proxy metrics with AIS-derived daily port indicators from IMF PortWatch. The workflow includes AOI design, cloudaware scene filtering with alternative-date fallback, proxy extraction, AIS temporal aggregation, metric fusion, anomaly scoring, and statistical quality checks.