TinyOctopus Pacific Northwest Currents App

[Gary Jacek]

Some of you may have licensed this app, as I did on my iphone/ipad.

It is a convenient, portable version of the hydrographic service current charts for Georgia Strait and vicinity.

Planning next years paddles, I notice it does not accept dates in 2022. It just quietly rotates the year back to 2021.
If you fail to notice this behavior, you could launch into currents you never expected.

I have reported the problem.

Home page

You may wish to reserve purchase until the useful product life exceeds 70 days.

 

[Gary Jacek]

I received a reply from TinyOctopus.

"Hi,

CHS (the data source) does not publish that far in advance. So I release a yearly data update when the data is available, which is sometime in December.

Hope this helps,
David Jade
TinyOctopus LLC"

Patience, I guess.

 

[JohnAbercrombie]

Gary-
Thanks for that 'heads up'.
It's really poor software design not to have a pop-up warning about 'The date you requested isn't available' in a bold and colourful text box.
This all doesn't inspire much (or any) confidence in TinyOctopus, in me.

That software/app is basically just an electronic version of the Current Atlas-Juan de Fuca Strait to Strait of Georgia.
The page to refer to in the Current Atlas depends on the tide heights at Pt Atkinson.

1. The 2022 Tide Tables have been released by CHS.
https://charts.gc.ca/publications/tables-eng.html
2. Borsboom has (free) 'cheat sheets' for quick reference to the Current Atlas pages for the years through 2030, so that tide data must be available somewhere.
https://borsboom.io/current-atlas-tables/
Here's the page for 2022 (also available as a .pdf so you can print it and keep it with your Current Atlas).
http://downloads.borsboom.io/current-atlas-tables/tables/current_atlas_jdf_sog_tables_2022.html

I'm sticking to the paper version, thanks!

 

[nootka]

It's a sad state of affairs when a software developer relies on CHS when all the data is out there on the internet.

And when I state data, I don't mean the tide & current values, but the harmonic constants. If you can't write a program to calculate values from the harmonic constants then maybe you never took any computer science courses in university.

 

[alexsidles]

And when I state data, I don't mean the tide & current values, but the harmonic constants

Ah, but NOAA's publication, Tidal Analysis and Prediction, has an entire chapter on "Nonharmonic Analysis of Water Level and Current Data," and a sub-chapter on "Hydrodynamic Considerations," as well as a sub-sub chapter on "Variations in Nonharmonically Determined Time and Height Differences." It appears that even in the age of computer science, the accuracy of tidal predictions still depends, in part, on regularly updated, local observations.

Thus, I think it's possible that CHS's annual update might actually be, well, a genuine update! It would be an interesting exercise to compare the predictions from an older tide table against the predictions from a new one, to see if the new predications actually took account of new observational data, or if, instead, the new predictions merely extrapolated from the old predictions based on harmonic constants.

Alex

 

[nootka]

^ Especially true when ocean levels are rising. But given that there are no local observations of tide heights at Surge Narrows, I'll have to make do with my imprecise but close enough forecasts.

I wonder how many BC stations have been updated in the last decade? We all know that Ottawa treats the east coast preferentially.

 

[Gary Jacek]

TinyOctopus updated their app earlier this month.