ATS Labs · Episode 01 · Open data, production-grade map
NOAA on the coast
Tide gauges, buoys, and the one quirk that costs you an afternoon.
The problem
Public data, and then the first afternoon
Every six minutes NOAA publishes the water level at 300 coastal stations, and every hour nearly 900 ocean buoys report what they measured. It is public data with no key. The hard part is knowing where it lives and what it does to you the first time: the datum, the timestamps, and the 52 gauges on the Great Lakes.
Watch it work
Episode 1 — NOAA on the coast (6:10)
Two NOAA sources end to end: the CO-OPS station metadata and datagetter APIs, the three details that cost the most time, the NDBC fixed-width observation file, and the two Labs maps they turn into.
What it covers
Two sources, three traps, two maps
- Source one, NOAA CO-OPS: the station metadata API and the datagetter API (water_level, predictions, interval=hilo), JSON with no key; errors arrive inside an HTTP 200.
- The three details that cost the most time: mean lower low water (the chart datum), GMT timestamps, and the Great Lakes gauges that return no predictions.
- Source two, NOAA NDBC: one fixed-width text file refreshed hourly, MM where a sensor did not report, parsed at build time because NDBC sends no CORS headers.
- How it becomes a map: load the catalog once as a point layer, fetch the detail on click.
- Tide Watch: every CO-OPS water-level station, a live card, next high and low, a 72-hour observed-versus-predicted curve.
- Sea State: buoys colored by significant wave height and a live five-day Marine Weather API forecast for any buoy or any point of open water.
What it does not do
- No historical archive queries (the apps show the current observation and the 48–72-hour window).
- No tide predictions for the Great Lakes (NOAA publishes none; the apps say so).
- Buoy observations are a build-time snapshot with its timestamp in the header; only the forecast is live.
Where the data comes from
Every endpoint in the episode
- NOAA CO-OPS metadata API — api.tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/mdapi/prod/
- NOAA CO-OPS data API — api.tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/api/prod/
- NOAA NDBC latest observations — ndbc.noaa.gov/data/latest_obs/latest_obs.txt
- Open-Meteo Marine Weather API — open-meteo.com/en/docs/marine-weather-api
- Source sheet with every endpoint and parameter — allthingsspatial.io/pages/sources.html#noaa-co-ops
Build with us
Need this on your data?
Tide Watch and Sea State are ATS Labs builds — the Calcite Design System on the ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript, over public NOAA feeds — and they are a demonstration of what All Things Spatial builds. The real thing — your stations, your data, your brand, your infrastructure — is the work we do for clients.