New wind and wave app

[jcon12]

Hi all,

I just put together a website ( straitweather.com ) which displays the current weather conditions at some government buoys and wind stations. I plan to add several additional features such as:

- tides
- self reporting for current conditions
- weather and wave forecast tool
- maybe even a fishing journal which you can share publicly showing your catch depths, lures etc

For the meantime it displays the latest (on the hour) weather update. If the buoy is working and displaying wave height I will use that, for areas without buoy data I run the wind speed, direction etc through my own machine learning algorithm which predicts the wave height. This is shown by the colouring on the map.

While viewing on your computer or ipad you will see a graph of the past 6 hours after clicking on one of the icons. If on mobile only the small infowindow will show.

You can also review the table in the top left corner and select a station or buoy to see the popup window with more details. This table can also be minimized using the small " - " button above it.

Looking for suggestions as I'd love to continue to add new features and will likely turn it into a mobile app for Iphone and android.

Hope you find it helpful!

straitweather.com

 

[kaelc]

Sick, you have skills!

 

[Aquaholic]

Following

 

[P999mm]

Awesome, looks great, as I cross the strait a few times a month, will be sure to check your site on a regular basis.

Thank you.

 

[CiscoCat]

nice work. Information further south would be great. North arm, South arm, Porlier and Active Pass,

 

[Corey_lax]

nice work. Information further south would be great. North arm, South arm, Porlier and Active Pass,

There's only so many weather buoys to work with.

 

[jcon12]

appreciate the feedback everyone. I will have the common closure areas mapped out soon and allow you to toggle fishing layers on and off while showing your position on the map.

 

[MikePA]

Looks great!!

 

[wildthing]

howe sound would be a good one for the winter months

 

[Whole in the Water]

Looks very good. Have you thought about expanding to cover the Juan de Fuca Strait? Lots of fisher and boating folks in the greater Victoria area?

 

[Matthias]

This is great!!
I know it's probably not within the scope of your project but if there was a forecasting model built into this... That would be

 

[jcon12]

Definitely expanding and will include howe sound, juan de fuca etc soon. The forecasting tool will be fairly simple, just looking for a reliable data source to get the wind from.

I am hoping to have the fishing areas as an overlay in the next week or so! I'll be mostly focussing on the vancouver, SOG area first then expanding from there.

 

[tannerc]

Very cool. It would be handy to have a pop
up menu to the past few hours available on mobile as well.

It might start to take up too much space, but a webcam icon for the few spots that have webcams could be a good feature. Pipers lagoon, French creek harbour. Ect.

I find when I’m unsure on the wind or taking the family out in the Nanaimo area I’ll check entrance light current condition, check the past few hours, check the forecast and give the webcam on big wave Dave a look.

Great work.

 

[Alex_c]

Awesome work! I was actually thinking of doing something similar for a project, but have been busy working on other projects! Are you using an API for the data? If you need another dev to help add features, I’d be willing to help. I’m an Android developer, so my web dev skills are a bit basic, but I can learn anything pretty quick. Alternatively, I could help port this to Android as a native app or widget. PM me if that interests you.

 

[Irishwolf]

This is great! There’s lots of public web services/rest end points for current wind data. If you’re good at web traffic scrapping you can actually find and access these end points from any of the current wind apps like big wave Dave. I experimented with this last year with success, but got busy. Happy to help out if needed as I’m a developer as well.

I was hoping to build a location specific weather app. For example, click on the Victoria waterfront and immediately have access to relevant webcams, current wind and tides conditions etc etc instead of needing to do the manual checking of 4 different websites yourself. This gets a bit blurry at 430 in the morning.

 

[jcon12]

Thanks for the feedback so far and appreciate the leads on some endpoints!

I have added some additional layers showing fishing regions and the ability to toggle them on and off. I plan to keep adding regions and details requested above.

 

[chille51]

This is great, bookmarked. Also didn't know about Big Wave Dave, so two bookmarks from this thread. You guys and your programming and development skills are blowing my stereotypes about fishermen right up.

 

[jcon12]

I've uploaded most fishing areas in the SOG and JDF (except gulf islands which will come soon). I've added a mobile friendly view of the last 6 hours as well if you click on "show history" after selecting a weather station or buoy.

You can also share your location which will track your movements in real time.

I'll be expanding the wave forecaster to howe sound and JDF and running a more fine tuned algorithm for each area.

I tested it out all week on our trip through the gulf islands and it didn't let us down

 

[Salmon Seeker]

Hi, thanks for making this! Just wondering what units the wind speed is in?
Cheers

 

[Murry]

Great App!!
Any plans to do it for the west side of Vancouver Island.
We need it!!!!