There appears to be an issue with the NOAA Coastwatch servers. Their web service which has been serving data that this app has been using for over a year apparently has an max date of 6/26/2015. I'm not sure what is happening with this, but the effect on the app is that it is no longer updating.

Every request being sent is asking for data about the last hour and since that is after 6/26, the server is giving an error. I'll be investigating this over the weekend and will contact NOAA if need be.

I've got emails out to 5 people in NOAA to try and figure out why this web service does not provide data after 6/26/2015.

In the meantime, I am evaluating other data services to pull buoy data from.

Edited: 07/06/2015 at 01:13 PM by mprentice

Without the 20 and 120 mile buoys, you may have other issues, .... hmmm

If you contact NOAA, you might also ask about their future.


20 and 120 mile buoy to be moved to Gulf in 3 weeks.








-------------------------
Puerto Rico 11 - 24 - 2013

I don't see either of these buoys listed for maintenance:

http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/ops.shtml

That would certainly be extremely bad news though.

The people I'm contacting are with the west coast node who handle their data servers. The east coast node doesn't provide the quality of data available with the WCN. The data itself is everything that the NDBC (National Data Buoy Center) collects though, not just west coast data.

I will try to bring it up though if I can get some responsiveness from them.

The primary data provider for this NBDC data returned from vacation today (apparently the previous one is deceased , but his email address shows up on the data source still).

There was a problem with the data source within the NOAA systems. He was able to restart things and it is functioning properly again. I've been able to test the app on a couple of devices and it appears that things are back to normal.

Sorry for the interruption! He was glad that I reported the issue.

Not able to see the 20 or 120 buoy when I go to select buoy

It may be that they were offline the last time that the app updated its list of buoys (every 7 days). You may be able to resolve this by clearing the app's data and then relaunching it. This should trigger it to refresh the buoys.

Let me know if that works, I may need to add a feature to allow refreshing the buoys on demand if so.

I spoke to NOAA some more today and found data sets for both Tides and Winds. I will be working on integrating those into the app ASAP.

Very cool. Does NOAA have a proper API yet?

I made a simple web app to do something very similar years ago but it's purely text-based and was optimized for fast delivery over very slow mobile connections -
http://www.tomneilsonshapes.com/surf/

I'm using the http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/data/realtime2/ endpoint to grab text data. Is there something better out there now? I haven't dug into it in a few years.
I'm grabbing the yearly txt tide calculations and putting them into mysql and built an API on top of that to query the daily tide data. So I have a script that rebuilds the tide DB once a year for the new calculations.

Random thoughts I've had on improving it at some point that may be relevant for you:

Geo-fencing - grab location and pull in 3 closest ocean buoys, would require a whitelist for acceptable buoys, since you don't want to automatically pull in river or boat basin buoys, I'm assuming you're doing something like that now for tide data?

Data-visualization - optimize for quick/easy data ingestion. Make visual cues as to conditions instead of raw numbers which require inference (great example - https://medium.com/@raleighfelton/designing-a-true-minimal-surf-app-6ccafce647bd)

Multiple locations - use a ViewPager to swipe between multiple buoy locations (possible in-app purchase to add more buoys? Give them 1 for free, then .99 per location?)


Constructive criticism on your UI:
Ditch the massive image at top. You're using over half your screen to show a meaningless image and the buoy ID. Focus on the content. Why are people downloading this App - buoy/tide data. Make that data the primary focus of the UI. The first time I load it the image looks cool, but after that it's meaningless bloat, unless that image is a realtime shot of the location I've stored (cam screengrab maybe from closet cam from geolocation?).

ERDDAP is the API that I'm using. It's maintained the NOAA's west coast node.

I am doing some filtering of buoys, yes. There are a lot of "nearby" buoys which are offline or haven't reported in weeks/months. I don't have anything to filter out river or boat basin buoys as you suggest. I haven't seen anything in the data to support that kind of filtering.

ViewPager or similar implementation is something that I plan on doing once I support the ability to favorite buoys.

Visualization will come if the app proves useful to people. For now the focus is on notifications and minimizing the number of times people need to open the actual app at all. I'm not trying to compete with surf report apps/services. I'm just trying to fill the hole where they don't properly notify you when the waves, wind, and period is good. Surfline notifies you when the swell is coming in the next 6+ hours, but that isn't useful when the winds will be 20+ mph all week.

The surf image in the app will be going away once I get tide data displayed. There is nothing else but blank space to put there atm. 

 

 

You might not need a unique tag to filter out rive or boat basin buoys. If they are close enough to your area of interest, you could probably still use the wind data. River/basin bouys probably don't report swell height, so just the presence or absence of swell data might be an adequate indicator of an open-ocean buoy. Wave height might get reported by river/basin buoys, but is rarely likely over 1-2 feet, so you could simply filter out buoys that aren't reporting significant wave height over 2 feet, or wave period longer than 5 seconds.