Scoring the Perfect Day

Today I'm exploring a new weather-tracking app I've been building.

A while back I made a web and native mobile app called PhotoPro for my photography. It runs some very specific calculations like high-cloud percentages and wind speeds, pulled from the island forecast, to give me a daily score for the week ahead. As I keep improving it, though, I keep running into the limits of what I know and what I can actually get my hands on. Some of those limits I can fix. Others are simply out of my control. And beyond photography, I've got a big interest in the ocean and what makes for great surfing waves.

So I'm now beta testing a second app, built to track weather conditions for both land and ocean spots. It records the current conditions for each location, plus historic data from the previous day and the forecast for the next. The plan is to score the conditions for a given day, and then, as the data piles up, start to understand the patterns that make a good day for surfing or photography.

This is how I close the gap on the things I can't control or can't reach. I could improve PhotoPro enormously with a better weather model, for instance, but the good modern ones (like the one Google recently released) are incredibly accurate and incredibly expensive, so that's out of the question. Other data is hard to get for free too, like tides or ocean energy, so I'm leaving that out as well. With all of it I'd have much more accurate data and could make better forecasts, but you work with what you've got. There are also things no model can hand me. The island has micro-climates that are hard to predict, and for the beach reefs I can't forecast sandbars or how they'll reshape the waves. What I can do is track the conditions that are within reach and start to understand how they affect the waves.

The app is still in early beta, but I'm excited to see how it evolves and what the data turns up. My hope is that by tracking conditions and scoring them, I'll start to spot patterns and trends that help me plan my photography and surf sessions better. It's a fun project that pulls together my love of technology, photography, and surfing, and the data from this second app will feed back into PhotoPro's forecasts too, so it's a win-win. I'm treating it as a year-long project: fine-tuning the data collection and scoring, making sure I'm pulling from the best and most reliable free sources, and then digging into the data to see what it tells me. I'm looking forward to sharing what I find, and maybe even building some cool visualizations down the line.

This is also exactly the kind of side project I love. It's fun, it's a good way to exercise the mind with the coding and data analysis, and it's a way to learn more about my island and its surroundings: how a tiny spot in the middle of the Atlantic gets shaped by the weather, and how that in turn shapes the waves and the light I shoot in.