Tide Forecast App for Vancouver Coast

An app predicting tidal elevations for the given time near Vancouver / Strait of Georgia.

Some Cool features:

• Accurately predict tidal elevation of any given time at Vancouver coast for within the future 10 years!
• Beautiful plots of a tide chart +/- 24 hours of the given time.
• Possible extension to the other location in the Strait of Georgia, and presumably any coastal ocean of the world!

Who is going to love it?

• People enjoying sports the ocean coast: surfing, kayaking, ocean swimming, sailing...
• Commercial/Recreational ferry/boat/ship driver
• Scientist doing nearshore research
• Seals seeking food in tidal zone?!
• ...

Explanations

In theory, tide in the nature is mainly caused by the gravity attraction of moon and sun. Since the relative location between earth, moon and soon can be reliably predicted, then the ideal tidal elevation of a certain place is supposed to be calculated. And a bit more than that, earlier research found that tide is actually just a combination of hundreds (or more) waves with known frequencies (tidal constituents). As soon as we know the phase angle and amplitude of each tidal constituent, then we can easily predict of tide with a very good accuracy.

However, in the real life, tidal prediction is a bit more complicated than that, since the local tidal can also be largely dependent on geographical structures like shorelines and bathymetries. Luckily, based on the excellent records of tidal elevations worldwide, we have been able to calculate these necessary parameters to derive tidal elevations for the most coastal area in the world, and then a good prediction can be achieved by this calculation and slightly adjusted due to extreme weather conditions.

What's more, a correct prediction of tide is really important for commercial shipping, environment maintaining, coastal marine life and recreational purpose.

In my app, I will combine my background in oceanography and knowledge of program design in CPSC 210, to ensure my app of solid scientific foundation, good coding style and straightforward user interface.

User Stories

• As a user, I want to type in a time, and get the tidal elevation at that time and corresponding tidal chart of the day
• As a user, I want to save the search to MyFavoriteSearch
• As a user, I want to review all my saved TideSearch
• As a user, I want to delete some of my saved TideSearch
• As a user, I want to be able to save my favorite TideSearch list to a file
• As a user, I want to be able to load my saved favorite TideSearch list from a file

Phase 4: Task 2

• Map interface was used
• in my model package, FavoriteSearch class, I used a HashMap as a field to map my SearchKey (a string) and TideCalculate (a class containing all the necessary calculation procedure of a tidal analysis). The field is named as favoriteList, and it can avoid saving duplicate searches into my database.

Phase 4: Task 3

• Reflection:

• The cohesion of my design is not good enough, I should split some of my big Class into small classes, and each of them should be focused on a single task. For example, my TideGUI class are having too many functions about running the app instead of just focusing on GUI part, I should separate it in to a TideGUI and TideRun class.

• In my TideGUI class, I should also separate my titlePanel, buttonPanel and messagePanel into different classes, and build a TidePanel interface or super-class, so that I can put all my panels together and reduce some duplicated codes.

• In my ui package, I should design a Window abstract-class or interface, so that I can put some common behaviour of my InputWindow class and ReviewWindow class into it, which may reduce some replicated codes.

• For the same reason, my TideSearch function is too clumsy and contains a lot of calculation functions, I should just let TideCalculate class handle all the calculations.