The Wrack
The Wrack is the Wells Reserve blog, our collective logbook on the web.
Introducing the Wells Reserve Tide Tracker!
Posted by
| January 16, 2025
| Filed under: News
For Research Associate Jeremy Miller, the need for a clearer means of communicating sea level rise and flooding from coastal storms became very apparent on the night of January 13, 2024. “As my wife and I sat and watched the local evening news coverage of that day’s record-breaking storm event,” he shared, “the meteorologist was talking about breaking water level records in Portland. He referenced the record-breaking figure of 14.8 feet of water at the Portland tide gauge. My wife reacted immediately with a ‘Wow, that’s crazy!’ I asked her, ‘What is crazy? What does that mean to you, 14.8 feet of water at the Portland tide gauge?’ To which she responded, ‘Well, I guess there was almost 15 feet of water at the tide station right?’...wrong!”
“That 14.8 foot measurement is, in fact, in reference to the Mean Lower Low Water (MLLW), the same tidal datum that we use to show our daily tide heights. That is, if you were to stand at the very low tide line (or place where the lowest tides of the year line up), there would be 14.8 feet of water at that location on the coast. This made me realize that most people do not realize what tidal datum is and how it relates to all of the infrastructure around them, including their homes, businesses, and road crossings.”
Designing a New Tool
Driven by this “aha” moment, Jeremy set forth to create an app that would help present available data in a more accessible, comprehensible way. “You can find historical tides on one website, predicted astronomical tides on another, and storm surge predictions on yet another. And with a little work, you can find your property elevation. Of course, all these values must be relative to the same agreed-upon level, or else they cannot be compared in any meaningful way,” Jeremy explains. The goal of this new tool would be to automate and streamline this process, compiling and translating data so it could be displayed on the same graph for ease of use. Jeremy teamed up with tech-savvy volunteer Gordon Shannon to make this app a reality. After months of planning, complex coding, and trial-and-error, the Wells Tide Tracker is now ready to share with the public.
How It Works
This tool provides users in the Wells (and surrounding areas) “near-realtime” information on tidal and storm surge predictions, pulled from trusted NOAA sources. Most notably, users can select a specific location on the map and view its elevation in relation to this data on a selected date or date range, allowing them to assess risk and prepare for an upcoming storm’s potential impacts.
The app presents observed and predicted tides and storm surge, as well as observed wind gusts and speed. We expect that this tool will be a valuable resource for landowners, coastal practitioners, and community members as we brace for the winter storm season ahead. We are also hopeful that this work may eventually be transferable to other coastal communities and look forward to potential applications and collaborations within the greater reserve system.
This story was originally printed in the Fall 2024 Watermark.
