CCOM operates several tide stations. The three that are most likely to
be recording data are:
- Jackson Estuarine Lab at Fuber Straights, Great Bay, New Hampsire
- US Coast Guard Station, Fort Point, New Castle, New Hampshire
- Maine Maritime Academy, Castine, Maine
The last of these is generating the most complete data set, but has
only been in operation since the summer of 2008.
What we want to achieve is the ability to do predictive tides and
compare to actual tides.
I have done this before on the Jackson Lab data using the Perl
programming language, but it was for a single evaluation of time
offset and amplitude factor with reference to the NOAA Portland
primary station (used for the Portsmouth area tides, as well).
Since our prefered programming language is Python, I will probably
focus on Python tools, such as tappy.py
by Tim Cera of The St. John's River
Water Management District. Tappy uses the Least Squares method of
finding tidal constituents.
I will probably use Python's matplot for data
visualization. There also exist some rather serious math modules for
Python, e.g., numpy and scipy. (Both are used by tappy.)
The public result of this work will be web access to data and predictions. I
also hope to have some fairly easy-to-use tools for working with tide data,
particularly for doing bathymetric surveying.
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