Re^3: Ocean tides in Perl

[GrandFather]

Well, I have about 500 lines of C that uses a 37 coefficient set to perform tide prediction calculations but it's not code I can release to the public domain (I don't have ownership of it) and I'm not sure I could legally derive a Perl equivalent from it. However, it's pretty much solid calculation so the equivalent Perl wouldn't be a heck of a lot smaller. You can gauge from that the size of the coding task. Oh, and I don't know how compatible that set of parameters may be with publicly available tide parameter sets so the whole thing could be a complete waste of time in any case.

To be of any practical use a tide calculation module would need to use a set of parameters for which data is publicly available. It's about 10 years since I worked on any of this stuff so maybe things are different now, but then the data was considered valuable and was hard to come by. Because of the potential difficulty in getting data I'd think there would be little call for such a module in CPAN. My involvement in such calculations has long since passed so I have no particular current interest in creating such a module.

[flexvault]

About 20+ years ago, I wrote a small basic program for a Yacht Club. The data was available from a US government agency for a specific geographic location. The Yacht Club knew that their location was 1 hour 22 minutes behind the tide for that specific geographic location. With that information the program produced a chart something like the following for the entire year:

Tides for ____________________ starting with November 1, 2011.

Day        High      Tide  Height   Sunrise    Moon  Time      % Moon
           /Low      Time    Feet    Sunset                    Visible

Tu   1     High   3:41 AM     3.0   7:43 AM    Rise  1:23 PM      31
     1      Low  11:14 AM     0.2   6:47 PM
     1     High   5:57 PM     2.2
     1      Low  11:06 PM     1.1

The only calculations the program made was to adjust the 'Tide Time'. For perl to do this the script would be trivial.

From this discussion, it sounds like I needed to account for a lot more. Isn't tide predicting mostly an approximation?

[GrandFather]

For approximate times that technique is ok but gets worse the further separated the reference station and the point of interest are. The error is also a strong function of local sea floor topology. However if you are interested in tide height rather than just times of slack water then this technique can degrade rapidly over fairly short distances.

[Anonymous Monk]

Has been 20 years, but do you still have the code that generated that chart?

[pvaldes]

I can understand the reasons of any monk to be reluctant to show any code that is the result of many hours of hard work and I'm sure that the other monks think the same; in any case your reply sheds a lot of light on the subject and I think it points the OP in the right direction. In short, excelent advice, very illustrative to me, thank you.

[GrandFather]

You misunderstand. It's not my code to give. It was someone else's code I used to solve a problem for yet another person. The person I was solving the problem for obtained the code (legally) for the express purpose of solving a specific problem from the company that owned the code.