Third International Workshop for Port Meteorological Officers
Hamburg, Germany, 23-24 March 2006

Ship Safety and Security

Ship safety and security (Graeme Ball)
Japan experience (Toshifumi Fujimoto)
Generic call signs (Pierre Blouch)

Workshop's recommendations:

Ship security remains a concern for shipping companies and Member Countries, mainly because of the high number of ship piracy acts (more than 300 attacks every year, 30 crew members killed in 2004). The publication of a ship’s identification and more importantly its position via web sites, is regarded with great concern by shipping companies and can lead to some companies requesting that their ships be de-recruited from the VOS. This has already happened in several instances, e.g. since mid-2003, Australia lost more than 5000 ship reports per year because of such concerns from a fishing company, and Japan lost more than 300 VOS between March 2005 and December 2005.

A short term solution is to use a generic callsign, e.g.“SHIP”, although this (i) impacts on the integrity and usefulness of WMO publication no. 47, (ii) prohibits the relay of quality information from monitoring centres back to ship operators because identification of the relevant ship operator becomes practically impossible, and (iii) does not address ship security concerns for those ships sailing in regions where the traffic is low.

A longer term solution arising from discussions with SOT-3, JCOMM-2, and PMO-INT-III was now being proposed for adoption by WMO Executive Council, that: “WMO recommends that NMHS reclassify ship data transmitted in FM-13 SHIP format from essential data to additional data”. This would limit distribution of the data beyond NMHS and would require special agreement with third parties regarding the specific use of the data. For this proposal to succeed it will require the support of all NMHSs due to the question of who owns the original data

The PMO-INT-III also recommended that “WMO recommend that NMHS remove ships’ call signs from charts distributed to ships via the radio-facsimile or other means.

Other possible options that could be implemented nationally or regionally were as follows:

Japan proposed a solution where ship’s call sign transmitted via Inmarsat code 41 could optionally pass through a filter at LES Yamaguchi, whereby the real call sign would be replaced by letters “SHIP” before GTS insertion. Decisions whether or not to replace the ship’s call sign by “SHIP” would be the responsibility of the ship or the NMHS of the recruiting country. Countries adopting such a solution were urged to maintain a private database to help resolve monitoring problems.

The E-SURFMAR Programme Manager proposed a scheme of generic call signs to identify particular ship categories ( Minos, Batos, TurboWin etc). This would have the benefit of hiding the true identity of a ship but would not solve the problem in low traffic areas.  This would also assist with the compensation scheme established under E-SURFMAR.  For example, ship’s call signs could be coded Qttccnn where Q is letter “Q” (not used by any country at present), tt represents the ship category, cc the country operating the ship, and nn a sequential number (from 00 to ZZ).