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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I have been negligent in posting the process of buiding the last bit, the data visualization bit, on this project. But you will be able to read all about it in a forthcoming PowerPoint Presentation that I will post here.

The results are a set of several hundred Google Earth kmz files. You can access the top of the data at Kurt's Developement Web Site.

Now it is time to start the next project: TIDES

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