# THALWAG

> Turning India's fishing fleet into the world's largest ocean-observation network and a living, self-correcting model of the ocean.

THALWAG turns India's fishing fleet into the world's largest ocean-observation network -- a living, self-correcting model of the ocean. Based in Kochi, India.

Website: https://thalwag.com/ · Contact: derin@thalwag.com · Kochi, Kerala, India (9.9312° N, 76.2673° E)
Not to be confused with "thalweg" (the river-channel term) — THALWAG is the name of this organisation.
Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q141569497

## Pages

- [Ocean Intelligence - THALWAG](https://thalwag.com/): THALWAG turns India's fishing fleet into the world's largest ocean-observation network -- a living, self-correcting model of the ocean. Based in Kochi, India.
- [The Unfinished Map - THALWAG](https://thalwag.com/ocean/): More than 80 per cent of the ocean has never been mapped. THALWAG explains why, how we read the ocean without measuring all of it, and the eight laws that govern total ocean observation.
- [The Thesis - THALWAG](https://thalwag.com/thesis/): The founding thesis of THALWAG - The Unfinished Map, on model-corrected, fleet-based sensing of the Indian Ocean - and a first empirical study, both published on EarthArXiv under CC BY 4.0.
- [Open by Principle - THALWAG](https://thalwag.com/open-ocean/): THALWAG's open-science commitment: what observation data and methods are freely available, why openness is a design requirement not a policy choice, what remains protected and the honest reasons why, and how researchers can engage today.
- [For Fishers - THALWAG](https://thalwag.com/fishers/): THALWAG is built with Kerala's fishing community. Storm warnings, safety alerts, and a better understanding of the sea -- free, respectful, and always on your terms.
- [For Researchers - THALWAG](https://thalwag.com/researchers/): THALWAG is building a fishing-fleet observation network that will give ocean scientists access to dense, subsurface Indian Ocean data - eDNA, acoustics, fleet-scale T/S/O₂ - impossible for any single institution to gather. Open data, co-authorship, a living model, and a reanalysis archive; the network is pre-deployment.
- [For Government - THALWAG](https://thalwag.com/government/): THALWAG builds India's indigenous real-time ocean-observation backbone using the commercial fishing fleet - improving fisher safety, cyclone early-warning, search-and-rescue, and Blue Economy capability. Aligned with Ministry of Earth Sciences priorities and Atmanirbhar Bharat.
- [Partners & Investors - THALWAG](https://thalwag.com/partners/): THALWAG is building a capital-light ocean intelligence network on India's commercial fishing fleet. The structural advantages - fisher trust, a deepening data archive, and Indian Ocean coverage - are hard to replicate. The commercial model will sell ocean intelligence across shipping, insurance, offshore energy, aquaculture, and carbon verification.
- [About - Why I'm Building Thalwag - THALWAG](https://thalwag.com/about/): Derin George on why he's building THALWAG: the observation gap that shouldn't exist, what growing up on the Kerala coast taught him, why now is the right moment, and what he intends to do about it.
- [Log - THALWAG](https://thalwag.com/log/): Notes, updates, and thinking from THALWAG - on ocean observation, sensor design, open science, and building in the Indian Ocean. Written by Derin George.

## Live dashboard

- [THALWAG Ocean Dashboard](https://dashboard.thalwag.com/): a live chart of the Arabian Sea: real NASA sea-surface temperature, Argo floats and Copernicus currents, plus THALWAG sensor nodes (simulated until hardware is at sea, and labelled so). Guide: https://dashboard.thalwag.com/llms.txt

## Journal

- [Partnership, not platform: designing with fishers, not around them](https://thalwag.com/log/2026-06-20-partnership-not-platform/): Every vessel-of-opportunity programme that has tried to use fishing vessels for ocean observation has treated fishers as infrastructure. That is both ethically wrong and operationally self-defeating. Here is why the design has to be different.
- [Sensor economics: why the timing is right - THALWAG](https://thalwag.com/log/2026-06-10-sensor-economics/): The price collapse in solid-state ocean sensors over the past decade is real, but it is not uniform. This post looks at what has become cheap, what has not, and what that means for a fleet-scale observation network.
- [Why the Indian Ocean is underobserved - and why it matters](https://thalwag.com/log/2026-06-01-why-the-indian-ocean-is-underobserved/): The Indian Ocean drives the monsoon, feeds hundreds of millions of people, and is warming faster than any other major basin. We have less data on it than almost anywhere else in the world ocean. This post examines why.

## Papers and data (CC BY 4.0)

- [The Unfinished Map: Observing the Indian Ocean through Model-Corrected, Fleet-Based Sensing — EarthArXiv](https://doi.org/10.31223/X5J796)
- [Variance-ranked sound speed bases misclassify the surface duct: limits of profile RMSE as a proxy for acoustic prediction skill in the Bay of Bengal — EarthArXiv](https://doi.org/10.31223/X59B8P)
- [Study dataset and code — Zenodo](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22802582)
- [Study code — GitHub (nada-bob-ssp)](https://github.com/deringeorge-nebula/nada-bob-ssp)

## Optional

- [Full text of every page](https://thalwag.com/llms-full.txt)
- [Journal RSS feed](https://thalwag.com/log/rss.xml)
- [Sitemap](https://thalwag.com/sitemap-index.xml)