- The Port of London Authority maintains 12 tide gauges along the tidal stretch of the Thames and provides live readings, updated every minute and predicted tidal information.
- ThamesTides.org.uk provides tide times and height predictions for locations between Chiswick and Richmond Lock, namely Putney, Chiswick, Strand-on-the-Green, Brentford.
- The UK Hydrographic Office provides tide times and height predictions for locations along the Thames, namely Albert Bridge, Chelsea Bridge, Hammersmith Bridge and Kew Bridge (among others).
- The Environment Agency provides Kingston flow gauge data, updated every 15 minutes.
- Scrape data and aggregate it using Python:
- Fetch tidal gauge data every minute and save it into a SQL database
- Fetch tide times and height predictions and save it into a SQL database
- Serve the collected data through PHP on my web server:
- Calculate Above Ordnance Datum land heights where necessary
- Calculate current tide rise speed
- Calculate whether the Thames Barrier is closed based on the difference between the readings on the Silvertown and Charlton PLA tide gauges
- Output this information in JSON format
- Add tidal information to my Home Assistant dashboard (it parses JSON)
- [TBC] create a pretty HTML page that fetches the JSON from my PHP script using Javascript and neatly presents the information
git clone https://github.com/ZeevoX/thamestides.git && cd thamestidespython3 -m pip install pytz requests apscheduler beautifulsoup4Quick start (Linux):
./thamestidesCommand line options:
~/thamestides$ python3 server/main.py -h
usage: main.py [-h] [-l LOGLEVEL] [-o LOGFILE]
Monitor the tidal stretch of the River Thames
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-l LOGLEVEL, --log LOGLEVEL
Set the logging level {DEBUG,INFO,WARNING,ERROR,CRITICAL}
-o LOGFILE, --output LOGFILE
Output to a log fileNB: supervisord required
# create a process configuration file, enable the daemon and start it
./daemon enable
# check whether the daemon is currently running
./daemon status
# open the daemon's log file (scrollable; uses `less`)
./daemon log
# self-explanatory
./daemon start
./daemon stop
./daemon restart
# stop the daemon and remove its configuration files
./daemon disableThis repository does not document how to set up a PHP web server.
Make sure the thamestides directory is accessible through your web server of choice for this to work.
I test this project on Apache/2.4.41 with PHP 7.4.3.
NB: Requires PHP >= 7.0
If you send bad JSON or request invalid data the server will attempt to respond with an appropriate response code and error message, but this is not guaranteed.
| URL parameter | Since | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| predictions | 0.0.1 |
any | if set, fetch predicted data for the requested stations |
| readings | 0.0.1 |
any | if set, fetch historical measurements for the requested stations |
| station | 0.0.1 |
string | name of tidal station for which to fetch data; equivalent to stations with one item; this parameter overrides stations if both station and stations are set |
| stations | 0.0.1 |
string | comma-delimited, spaceless string list of tidal stations for which to fetch data or all to get all available stations |
| last_n | 0.0.1 |
int | positive integer representing the maximum number of rows of data to output from the database |
| start | 0.0.1 |
datetime | optional parsable datetime string representing the start time of the period of data to fetch; to be used in conjunction with end; default = 24 hours ago |
| end | 0.0.1 |
datetime | optional parsable datetime string representing the end time of the period of data to fetch; to be used in conjunction with start; default = now |
| filter_non_null | 0.0.1 |
any | if set, remove NULL values from measurements (e.g. when data unavailable for that time period or gauge was offline) |