Fishing Zone AdvisoryBay of Bengal · Pilot
University of Dhaka · Department of Oceanography

Know where the fish are.
Know when to stay in port.

A satellite-guided fishing zone advisory for the Bay of Bengal. It reads the ocean the way an experienced fisher does — temperature breaks, water colour, sea-floor structure — and refuses to recommend any zone the weather makes unsafe.

234

Analysis zones

7

Data layers

0.2°

Grid resolution

Sample zone

BOB-0711
85score

High fishing potential

20.90°N, 90.30°E · 180 m depth

Safety checks passed

Thermal front92
Productivity78
Sea floor71
Habitat fit100

“Strong temperature break — 0.44 °C change over 10 km, over a shelf-edge drop-off with productive water above it.”

The portal

Built to be checked, not just believed

Fishers already read the sea well. This portal adds what a boat cannot see from the deck — and shows its reasoning so it can be judged against experience.

Graded zone map

The Bangladesh maritime area is divided into analysis cells and graded green, yellow or red for fishing potential on an Esri ocean basemap.

Explainable index

Five weighted sub-indices — thermal fronts, productivity, sea-floor structure, habitat fit and current convergence — combine into one 0–100 score.

Safety before catch

Storm signals, rough seas, protected areas and shallow water override the score. A high-scoring but unsafe zone is never recommended.

Every layer visible

Temperature, chlorophyll, bathymetry, currents and weather can each be inspected, so the advisory can be checked rather than trusted blindly.

The chain

From satellite to boat in four steps

The full processing chain — every data source, weight, threshold and safety rule — is documented in the methodology page, along with an interactive version of the scoring engine you can experiment with.

See the full methodology
01

Ocean data arrives

Satellite temperature and ocean-colour fields, bathymetry, currents, wave forecasts and storm warnings are collected on their own schedules.

02

The portal processes it

Cloudy pixels are masked, layers are aligned onto one grid, and the gradients that mark fronts and drop-offs are computed.

03

Zones are scored and screened

Each cell gets a Fishing Opportunity Index, then passes a safety screen that can override the result outright.

04

Advisory reaches the boat

A colour-graded map with plain-language reasons, confidence tags and downloadable offline packages.

An academic pilot

This portal is proposed by the Department of Oceanography, University of Dhaka, as a pilot for satellite-guided fishing advisories in Bangladesh's maritime waters.

Supervision

Dr. Abu Hena Muhammad Yousuf

Associate Professor & Chairman
Department of Oceanography, University of Dhaka

Why the Bay of Bengal first

The ocean side of the problem has the richest and most standardised satellite coverage, so it is where an advisory can be built and validated soonest. Bangladesh also has an unusually wide continental shelf and the Swatch of No Ground canyon, which together create exactly the fronts and drop-offs this method is designed to detect.

For fishing communities

Less fuel spent searching, and a clear warning before setting out into unsafe water.

For marine research

A reproducible, documented pipeline that can be validated against real catch records over time.

Demonstration build. The ocean values shown throughout this portal are synthetic sample data generated to reproduce the spatial patterns of the northern Bay of Bengal. The processing chain, scoring engine and interface are fully functional — connecting operational data feeds replaces the sample layer without changing anything downstream.