Introduction

The project that has turned into MetOcean Viewer began in September 2013. One of the more difficult simple tasks with station data, at least for me, has been quickly and easily processing the data into a format that is easy to explore spatially with little to no pre-processing. I decided that there had to be a good way to process this data without any real effort. I credit most of the codes I've generated over the last few years to my hatred of repetitive tasks.

For a few years, Google Earth was the solution. I would create JPG images of each time series hydrograph in Matlab, use a code to generate a KMZ file with the images at the station locations, and then drive through the data in Google Earth. Once the process was flushed out, it took about 30-45 minutes to view a file. This, however, is still a fairly cumbersome process that is fairly inflexible.

While working on a rather large scale model validation assignment with hundreds of ADCIRC time series stations to sort through, I decided to pursue a cleaner solution. The first iteration of the code was only able to compare two IMEDS formatted files containing the same list of stations. This used the C++ side of the code to process the data, Google Maps to display the station locations, and the Google Charts API to make some hydrograph plots. Later versions would remove the Google Charts API in favor of the more flexible HighCharts API, extend the code's capabilities to plot more than two files, and add additional file formats among other features.

Currently, the code is mostly maintained in my spare time, however, I welcome any help anyone can provide.

--Zach