Swell Tracker
This app uses data from NOAA’s wave model (WWIII) and buoy data near Santa Cruz (buoyid = 46042) to report on the live surf and wind conditions. You can open the app with this link or explore it below. The data is loaded into R using the rnoaa and rNOMADS packages. (The WWIII model map is currently broken so I removed it. I will try and get it back up and working again soon!)
In future versions of this app, I plan to animate the wave model data. I would also like to add features that give the user more control (i.e., be able to select regions and buoys) and possibly create a predictive long-range model. This app is currently limited by the slow nature of data retrieval from NOAA. To prevent it from timing out before loading, I have a separate script for extracting the data, filtering it down, then saving the results to file. I am using a scheduling manager (Cron) to automate this process but, unfortunately, this only updates the files on my computer so I have to redeploy the app in order to display the most recent data (which defeats the purpose of real-time data). I am currently in the process of figuring out how to automate the app using google sheets and the googlesheets4 package in R. My code is available on Github.
Please note that the app may take a minute to load.
Gabriel Mednick, PhD
Data scientist, biochemist, computational biologist, educator, life enthusiast