Thank you Mike, this plugin promises to be a very welcome addon with essential convenient planning features! We can now easily move forward in time and see Tides! I had just ignored the tides in
Opencpn until now.
Your plugin generates many ideas for tidal improvements! So please forgive me if I speed ahead too fast.
In many respects this plugin is like the grib viewer, but it is using a tidal database, so is it possible to use some of the control aspects of that plugin with Tides plugin?
For example, I really like the feature in Grib where you can locate your cursor in the time window and the simply use your mouse
wheel to scroll back and forth through time. The calendar popup for setting date is very useful for planning trips, but once done with that, the
wheel scroll feature would be useful.
I am sure there are some other features for playback that would be useful. Say you could set a time line progress bar to be "Day", "Week", or perhaps "Month" and then play it at an adjustable speed during that timeline....just and idea.
Tide Overlap Map with Slack tide location shown as a fat line.
Another idea is the ability to represent the tidal forces not only as a Vector with direction and speed indication, but as a shaded overlay which has the fastest incoming tidal areas darker green and the faster outgoing area darker red, with the zones between gradient shades (the areas between actual tide data would be interpolated like the grib files). (Climatology does this type of gradient shading with all of its datatypes using opengl.)
Some of the information that would come out of this overlay would be the areas of slack tide which is a broad area that changes location with the changing of tide, and thus it in and out of bays and large bodies of
water.
Planning using the slack tide can be very useful sometimes, for example you can catch an outgoing tide in
Long Island and if you can make it to near Brenton Light
Newport sometime around slack, you can then catch the incoming tide and get a significant push up into Buzzards Bay. The Tide overlay with a planned routing showing boat's future location (based on weather_routing and grib data/route, or based on a more simple estimated STW) would visually show this effect. I think it could be an excellent planning tool.
Mike, Thank you for providing us with this plugin.
Linear Mode
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