USACE Waterborne Commerce Statistics Center (WCSC)

The USACE Waterborne Commerce Statistics Center (WCSC) is the official collector of US waterborne commerce statistics - a technical center of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Institute for Water Resources that captures vessels, tonnage, commodities and origin-destination pairs directly from vessel operating companies to support navigation project feasibility analysis and investment decisions. A vessel-tracking feed shows you where ships moved; WCSC records what they carried, in short tons, on named waterways, into named ports.

Five product families make up the shelf. TOWS (Transportation Operational Waterborne Statistics) covers movements of foreign and domestic vessels and commodities with a US origin or destination, including navigation points of interest, waterway and port usage, and navigation project usage. The Waterborne Cargo and Trips manuscript files (WCUS Parts 1-4) present commodity movements at ports, harbors, waterways and canals of the United States and territories, with national totals carried under waterway code 9950 - domestic movements are collected by USACE itself while foreign commerce comes through the Census Bureau. Monthly Commodity Indicators nowcast tonnage from Lock Performance Monitoring System data via linear regression models for Total commodities, Coal, Farm & Food, Chemical and Petroleum groupings, each release explicitly superseded by processed actuals as they land. The WTLUS vessel files (Waterborne Transportation Lines of the United States) describe the fleet itself across eight tabular files: Vessel Inventory, Vessel Company Summary, Tow Boats, Deck Barges, Dry Covered Barges, Dry Open Barges, Other Dry Barges and Tank Barges. And the geospatial shelf holds 150 Principal Ports polygons with calendar-2023 total, domestic, foreign, import and export tons, Port and Port Statistical Area boundaries, National Waterway Network links and nodes carrying Linktons commodity tonnage, river mile markers and close to 12,000 navigation facility records.

The annual Waterborne Commerce of the United States report consolidates the parts for calendar year minus two, alongside a quarterly Schedule K classification of foreign ports, monthly MDPlus public extract files and Fact Cards. Commodity coding follows Standard International Trade Classification Revision 3, with published cross-references to LPMS codes and NAERG hazardous-commodity mappings. Get a sample of this dataset cut to your ports, waterways or commodities.

Five verified rows from the Principal Ports table, shown exactly as the fields arrive - rank, port code, coastal-or-internal type, name, and the five-way tonnage split:

# Principal Ports - one row per port, short tons, calendar year 2023
rank 2   port 2253  South Louisiana, LA, Port of     [Coastal]
    total 217,531,611 | domestic 109,130,807 | foreign 108,400,804
    imports 32,432,311 | exports   75,968,493
--------------------------------------------------------------
rank 14  port 700   Baltimore, MD                    [Coastal]
    total  49,875,915 | domestic   3,555,543 | foreign  46,320,372
    imports 14,953,658 | exports   31,366,714
--------------------------------------------------------------
rank 34  port 4722  Seattle, WA                      [Coastal]
    total  17,153,645 | domestic   3,647,071 | foreign  13,506,574
    imports  7,640,777 | exports    5,865,797
--------------------------------------------------------------
rank 40  port 2417  Galveston, TX                    [Coastal]
    total  12,954,272 | domestic   7,759,521 | foreign   5,194,751
    imports  1,835,652 | exports    3,359,099
--------------------------------------------------------------
rank 64  port 2294  Memphis-Shelby County Port, TN   [Internal]
    total   7,195,444 | domestic   7,195,444 | foreign           0
    imports          0 | exports            0

Three things worth noticing. First, the five-way split arrives pre-computed - South Louisiana, the number-two US port at 217.5 million tons, moves almost exactly half domestic and half foreign cargo, a fact a single total column would bury. Second, TYPE is the fastest filter in the file: Memphis reads 7,195,444 tons with zero foreign and zero imports because it is an Internal port living entirely on domestic waterways, which is the whole inland story in one row. Third, the numeric PORT code is a stable join key that survives every spelling variant of a port name, which is what lets these rows absorb vessel-trip detail, waterway segments and commodity codes without the join going soft.

The verified dictionary below documents the WTLUS vessel-characteristics files - sixteen fields running from vessel identity (VESSEL, VS_NAME, the Coast Guard registration number) through class and construction codes (VTCC, ICST), physical dimensions (lengths, breadths, drafts), motive power and capacity (HORSEPOWER, CAP_TONS, CAP_PASS), equipment and operating bases, to the operator code and the principal commodities the company reports. Two fields quietly unlock fleet analytics on their own: VTCC distinguishes a steel self-propelled liquid bulk tanker (2A22) from everything else in the fleet, and TS_OPER ties every surveyed vessel back to its operating company with a division-and-district-prefixed code.

Definitions come from the publisher's own documentation and were verified during research, so the dictionary is shape-exact rather than inferred. The cargo, trips, port and waterway-network tables carry their own column sets - movement, commodity-code and Linktons attributes - documented in full with your sample rather than padded into the headline table.

• Geography: the United States and its territories, whole-of-system - coastal seaboards, the Great Lakes and the inland waterway network, plus Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and Pacific trust territories. Foreign origin-destination enters through Census Bureau trade data and the Schedule K foreign-port classification, so a domestic trip and an import leg can sit in one model.
• Temporal: manuscript cargo and trips data released for 2004-2023, with the consolidated WCUS report landing at a calendar-year-minus-two lag; WTLUS vessel files annual with 2023 current; Principal Ports at calendar year 2023; monthly commodity indicators covering the current calendar year.
• Granularity: per-vessel-trip and per-vessel records that roll up cleanly to port, harbor, waterway, canal, state and national levels - the national totals live under waterway code 9950. Commodity detail rides WCSC/SITC Rev 3 codes, and ports summarize as total, domestic, foreign, import and export short tons.
• Scale: 150 principal port polygons, eight WTLUS files covering thousands of surveyed vessels, nearly 12,000 navigation facility records and a twenty-year movement archive - the reference volume for anything that floats on a US waterway.

On Datadory's 0-10 quality rubric this record scores 9, against a 7.81 average across the 1,744 cataloged datasets - verified field documentation, statutory collection and a twenty-year depth, discounted mainly for the reporting lag on the consolidated annual view.

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

You pick the channel and the cadence; the verified field dictionary above travels unchanged across all three. Because this collection mixes grains - port-year summaries, vessel-trip movements, vessel-characteristic records and network geometry - tell us which tables you want standing and we pin the feed to those shapes, so a new year arrives beside the last one diffable rather than re-modeled. Tabular cuts suit warehouse loads and BI tools, the GIS layers drop straight into mapping stacks, and switching cadence later is a settings conversation, not a re-integration project.

• Navigation investment and feasibility analysis - the collection exists to rank waterways and ports by usage, so business cases for terminals, fleeting areas and channel work start with the same tonnage arithmetic the planners use.
• Freight-flow and modal-shift modeling - origin-destination commodity movements across coastal, Great Lakes and inland routes are the baseline against which rail and truck diversion scenarios get tested; background in waterborne commerce statistics.
• Commodity desk benchmarking - Coal, Farm & Food, Chemical and Petroleum groupings in the monthly indicators give trading and sourcing teams a fast-read pulse between annual releases.
• Fleet and capacity intelligence - the eight WTLUS files enumerate the towboats and barges actually moving American cargo, with horsepower, carrying capacity and operator codes attached; definitions in waterborne commerce.
• Port and waterway benchmarking - the five-way tonnage split ranks any peer set of ports in one query, from South Louisiana's 217.5 million tons down the table.
• Joining flows to movements - port codes and waterway-network nodes key these tonnage rows onto AIS tracks and global port references, so volumes, voyages and destinations resolve in one model.
• Cited national statistics - attribution runs to a statutory federal collection, which survives editors, filings and peer review.

Data scientists get a government-collected panel with clean numeric keys - port codes, waterway codes, vessel IDs - that joins without scraping surgery; workflow notes in data scientists use cases. Competitive-intel and product teams track which gateways and corridors gain tonnage share and size the inland barge adjacency before rivals price it; patterns in competitive intel product teams use cases. Market researchers and consultants anchor logistics deliverables in tonnage baselines whose provenance is statutory rather than vendor-supplied; approaches in market researchers use cases. Journalists, academics and students cite a national statistical program when writing about America's freight arteries; see journalists academics use cases. Developers and builders wire the feed once as the flow layer behind routing, siting and ESG tools; wiring notes in developers builders use cases.

• NGA World Port Index (Pub 150) - the static global reference: about 3,801 ports with depths, facilities and positions. WCSC supplies the American tonnage that flows through them (World Port Index).
• BTS Maritime Data and Port Performance Freight Statistics - performance measures for US gateways: dwell times, waiting queues and container rankings. WCSC supplies the underlying flows those performances are measured against (BTS Maritime).
• MarineCadastre AIS Vessel Traffic Data (USCG Nationwide AIS) - where vessels actually sailed, trip by trip; WCSC tells you what those trips weighed (MarineCadastre).
• UK Maritime and Shipping Statistics (DfT) - the British counterpart series; the head-to-head lives in our UK DfT vs WCSC comparison.

Two honesty notes before you request a sample. First, this is a multi-grain collection: port-year summaries, vessel-trip movements, vessel-characteristic files and network geometry each live in their own tables - name the grain and the sample ships that table's exact shape. Second, mind the reporting rhythm: the consolidated annual view trails the calendar by two years, and the monthly indicators are model nowcasts that get superseded by processed actuals - treat them as a pulse, not the ledger. Full slice ranking sits on the marine transportation data hub, with the ranked view at best marine-transportation datasets and the collecting agency profiled at U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.