Introducing the new Wells Reserve Tide Tracker tool!
We are excited to launch the new Wells Reserve Tide Tracker. Using this tool, you can view historical tide and wind data, as well as predicted tides and storm surge. You can also obtain the elevation of any location from Kennebunk to Ogunquit and assess the flood risk at that location.
Try it out! To get started, click the button below to open the Tide Tracker. Once there, open the Graph page and select a specific date and elevation. Select the Graph Tutorial button for more detailed instructions.
Example for select location on the Barrier Beach Trail from January 10-13, 2024
About the Tide Tracker
In January 2024, two record-breaking storm events hit the coast of Maine, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and breaking water level records at Wells Harbor going back to the 1990’s. How can we get the most reliable predictions about future storm tides, and most importantly, relate that to the elevation of our homes, businesses or points of interest?
You can find historical tides on one web site, 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 vertical datum, or else they cannot be compared in any meaningful way. Then you might like to see all that data on a graph so you can quickly visualize it over time.
This application solves the problem by aggregating and presenting graphical tide data alongside an optional user-configured elevation based on a map location. It includes wind data, observed tide levels, astronomical tide predictions, and the predicted storm surge for four days into the future. All data is presented using the same vertical datum (point of reference), so that observations, predictions, estimations and elevations may be displayed on a single graph for accurate comparison.
Who is this for?
This is intended for the residents and property owners of Wells and the surrounding communities (Ogunquit/Kennebunk), particularly those with properties at lower elevations near the shore. Do you know the elevation of your property? If there were a storm coming, would you know how to get the relevant tide and storm surge predictions? And would you know how to ensure that those predictions and your property elevation were relative to the same vertical datum, so you are comparing apples to apples? If not, this is for you.
The People Behind the Project
This project grew out of a collaboration between Jeremy Miller, Wells Reserve Research Associate and Gordon Shannon, Wells Reserve Volunteer.
Gordon Shannon is a retired software engineer living in South Berwick. He arrived from Boulder, Colorado in 2018 and has been volunteering with Wells Reserve and the Research team since 2021. In the summer you can usually find him wandering around the marshes checking the blue crab traps, or playing piano at the Clay Hill Farm restaurant in Ogunquit. We are grateful to Gordon for the dedication, expertise and countless hours he put into developing this app.
Read more on the blog about how this app came to be.
Disclaimer: This web application gathers and collates publicly available information from the best available trusted data sources, listed on the Tide Tracker's "About" page. It does not generate or create predictions of future tide levels. The reliability of the data is only as good as the sources. Furthermore, actual water level at any given location may differ from the measured tide level due to variations of terrain and wave activity. As always, the local National Weather Service should be consulted for official storm surge forecasts and any watches or warnings.