What are locations depth, angle, slope?

[danielkamen]

Hi there, I'm a college student trying to build out a dashboard using surfpy to monitor a couple of my favorite spots not on surfline. I just have a couple questions about the code.

1. in /examples/fetch_bouy_forecast.py - is the location we put into surfpy.location the coordinates of the break, or the coordinates of the closest NOAA bouy?
2. in /examples/fetch_forecast.py - how did you calculate ri_wave_location.depth = 30.0 ri_wave_location.angle = 145.0 ri_wave_location.slope = 0.02? I've been to Narragansett town beach and the angle seems a bit steep. Same goes for depth.
   Edit: I realize now the depth refers to the number listed for the bouy on the NOAA site here: https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=44098
   However, the steepness is only measured in "VERY STEEP", "STEEP", "AVERAGE", or "SWELL".

Thank you! This project is really cool and just seeing the default example work is amazing!

[mpiannucci]

Hi!

1. In that example, its the location of the noaa buoy its comparing to
2. In that example, the depth is the deep water wave depth, so the depth at the location given for the wave forecast. The wave angle is the angle that the break or area you care about faces. This is not super scientific, and can be tweaked to different locations and such. The angle is the slope of the sea bottom floor, this is how you calculate the breaking hgieght of waves and how they interact with the bottom contour as the waves approach the shore.

There are much more scientific ways to caluclate all of this, but these parameters allow you to estimate an area you care about, tweak it to your observations to give yourself a simple customized forecast