s e a l e g s

Team: The Sheographers

 Welcome to the  wiki!

About Us

We are a group of Geograph-hers here at UCSB!

Why sealegs? When you're new at something, you often don't have your "sea legs". We wanted to make a tool that aids new surfers in getting their "sea legs."

Motivation

To celebrate the new year, some of our friends wanted to get together to do a "polar bear swim." When we looked at available surfing applications, none of them made any comment about the level of bacteria in the water. One surfer friend was especially concerned, wanting to do dawn patrol but worried about the recent rains, runoff, and bacteria levels in the water.

Safety of surfers based on skill level has been an increasing concern for emergency personnel. Two weeks ago, five surfers had to be rescued from local beaches after turbulent conditions made ocean departure difficult.

Tags: Local, Adventure, Health & Fitness, Safety

Idea

This application addresses the concern of safe beach and surf activity by combining bacteria data with typical surf spot conditions such as wave height, wave direction, wave period, and sea surface temperature. It can help users figure out which beaches to go to based on their skill level.

Intended Users

Surfers of all levels
Beginner surfers who are unfamiliar with local surfing culture (especially women--it's a male-dominated sport!)
Beach goers

Data

We used the following data sources for our application:

wave height, direction, period and sea surface temperature: Coastal Data Information Program
water quality: County of Santa Barbara
forecast for wind, rain, tide and swell: NOAA Wavewatch III

Conceptual Framework

We combine both audio and visual information by using the Google Home Mini, Google Voice Assistant, Google Maps on Google Sites, and storage on the Google Cloud Platform.

Intended Workflow

Real-time water conditions are pulled from an RSS feed and stored in Google Cloud. This data generally gets updated from the sources weekly.
A user asks a surfing-related question to our Google Voice Assistant.
The user can also see a visual representation of beach conditions using our map.
A user can interact with the Google Voice Assistant after their surfing session to store sentiment of their experience in Google Cloud, which can help the Google Voice Assistant to refine future responses.