American Association of Port Authorities – U.S. Port Directory & Statistics

It is the industry's own directory, written by the people who run the berths. The American Association of Port Authorities – U.S. Port Directory & Statistics consolidates the two resources the association maintains for Western Hemisphere port authorities into one reference layer: a map-driven member directory where each pin opens a port profile — primary cargoes handled, navigational channel depth, authority contacts and web presence — and a statistics library of roughly one hundred tables covering North American container rankings and traffic, Caribbean and Latin American container traffic, cruise passengers by region, and U.S. waterborne trade by partner and customs district.

Then the numbers that made it quotable. The association's 2024 Economic Contribution Report, delivered alongside its EY technical analysis and an infographic, puts U.S. ports' contribution to national GDP at nearly $2.89 trillion and counts 1 in every 8 American jobs as port-supported — framing no federal source replicates. Within Datadory's catalog of 1,744 datasets averaging 7.81 on our rubric, this record scores 6/10: unmatched authority, field definitions marked inferred, and coverage windows that close earlier than the federal counterparts it curates. Get a sample of this dataset cut to the ports and table families you name.

The record arrives in two shapes, and honesty about this one starts here: research verified the schema without capturing live values. The five profile fields are documented by the association itself, and the table layer follows the published table titles, so the delivered layout reads as a contract rather than a preview:

# one record per AAPA member port - five documented fields
# (publisher-documented schema; values confirm when your sample is cut)

port_name       : <member port carried as a map-pin entry>           # string
primary_cargoes : <cargo categories handled at the port>             # text
channel_depth   : <navigational channel depth>                       # number
contact         : <authority contact details and website>            # string
table_values    : <TEU volumes and rank positions, table layer>      # integer

# companion library - roughly one hundred aggregate tables, one family per theme
North America / NAFTA container port ranking and traffic series
Caribbean and Latin America container traffic
Cruise passenger traffic by region
U.S. waterborne trade by partner and customs district
Historic U.S. port rankings through 2014
World port rankings
Canada, Mexico and Brazil country tables

Read the two halves as complementary grains. Each member port resolves to one profile row with five populated attributes — identity, what it handles, how deep its channel runs, who to call. Each table family resolves to port-by-period rows of TEU volumes and rank positions. Profiles originate as pins on the association's member-ports map, opened one port at a time; flattening them into addressable rows, and keying them against the table layer, is work Datadory does once so it never lands on your project plan. When the sample is cut, both halves return with real values and the dictionary locks to final column names — nothing about the shape changes in between.

Five fields define a port profile, all documented by the association and flagged inferred in our research notes: the definitions below are shape-exact, but no example values were captured during verification, and the map application's underlying structure was never queried. Four fields identify — name, cargoes, contact, website — and one measures, though the integer measure (container traffic and ranking values) lives in the table layer rather than the profile row, which is why the dictionary reads as identity-plus-reference rather than identity-plus-facts.

• Geography: the association's complete Western Hemisphere membership — United States, Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean. This is broader than any national directory: the same slice carries Caribbean and Latin American container-traffic tables and dedicated country tables for Canada, Mexico and Brazil.
• Temporal: layered windows by item type. The economic-contribution report is dated 2024, with Trade Currents Navigator issues from early-to-mid 2024; most container-ranking tables end between 2015 and 2017, trade tables between 2013 and 2017, and the historic U.S. rankings series extends through 2014.
• Granularity: per-port on the directory side, per-table on the statistics side — port-by-period rank and volume rows rather than vessel-move events, and one profile row per member port rather than per-terminal detail.

On Datadory's 0–10 rubric the record scores 6, against a 7.81 average across the 1,744 cataloged datasets and an 8.0 mean across the 11 primary marine-ports records — the deduction sits in documentation confidence and window depth, not in scarcity.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

You pick the channel and the cadence; the field dictionary above travels unchanged across all three.

Because the record is half profile-shaped and half table-shaped, most teams take both: profiles keyed once per port as a reference table, ranking series loaded as port-by-period panels beside throughput feeds such as container port traffic. Cadence changes are a settings conversation, not a re-integration project. Name the regions and table families you want and the sample returns shaped exactly like the blocks above.

• Authority-level benchmarking across two continents — set cargo mix and channel depth side by side for ports from the Great Lakes to the Caribbean, a comparison no single national directory supports.
• Headline market sizing — cite the $2.89 trillion GDP contribution and 1-in-8 jobs figure with their association attribution intact in decks, filings and theses.
• Competitive siting screens — profile rival ports' cargo handling and channel depths when positioning services, equipment or infrastructure investment.
• Container-share baselines — use the North American ranking series through 2017 as the historical baseline for share-shift narratives that continue into federal data years.
• Cruise-season planning — regional cruise-traffic tables feed port-call demand and seasonality models for tourism-dependent economies.
• Reference joins — the profile layer anchors name keys against quantitative companions such as USACE Waterborne Commerce, where tonnage exists but narrative context does not.

Journalists, academics & students lead the fit: the association's own report and statistics library are citable industry-authority sources, and the coverage windows arrive stated up front rather than discovered in review — patterns in journalists academics use cases. Market researchers & consultants benchmark Western Hemisphere cargo profiles for maritime infrastructure studies; framing in market researchers use cases. Competitive intelligence & product teams read rival ports' cargo mix and depths for siting and positioning work; workflow in competitive intel product teams use cases. Investors & quant researchers anchor infrastructure theses on the GDP and employment headline numbers; notes in investors quants use cases.

Notes that pair well with this page:

• BTS Principal Ports – National Transportation Atlas Database — 150 principal U.S. port polygons with CY 2023 tonnage: geometry and recency where this record offers profiles and history.
• CBP Ports of Entry – Official U.S. Port Directory — all 328 U.S. ports of entry with codes, addresses and port directors: the regulatory counterpart to the association directory.
• USACE Waterborne Commerce Statistics Center — tonnage, commodity and vessel-trip detail across 1,381 locations, 2002–2024: the quantitative engine this library complements.
• Natural Earth World Ports — a generalized point-layer port catalog for mapping the membership this record profiles.
• Glossary notes — what TEU container throughput measures, how a channel directory is structured, and what counts as waterborne commerce statistics.
• Marine Ports & Services data hub — the pooled view of the industry, from AIS feeds to port directories (hub); ranked picks in the best marine-ports-services datasets.

One honesty note before you build: this is the qualitative and institutional layer of the slice — profiles, ranks and headline economics. If your question needs per-commodity tonnage or vessel-trip counts, say so in the sample request and the right quantitative companion gets attached there.