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This webapp generates configuration files for
OpenCPN, the "Concise and robust
Chart Plotter Navigation software".
Specifically it generates harmonic files to provide OpenCPN with the
necessary tidal constituents to predict tidal height information at
specific tidal stations around the world.
If you don't know about OpenCPN, this page won't be of much use to
you. I recommend you look at the
OpenCPN website instead.
The official OpenCPN documentation is fairly terse on the matter of the harmonics files but there is more detail in various forums online. I believe OpenCPN used to ship with the required tidal constituents for much of the globe but due to the copyright holders in various geographic regions rescinding permissions for the previously freely available data sets, the software maintainers were forced to remove it from the downloads.
This project instead uses online data sets. Eg: the TICON-4 data set contains data on 4838 tidal stations across 116 countries at the time of writing. It's published under a Creative Commons licence so decide for your self if your use case is compatible with their legal requirements. There is also a TICON-4 User Manual which describes the data layout.
You'll need to download such a data set to your local device before making use of this app.
The data is far from perfect. Multiple entries appear for many stations.
Only the first station that OpenCPN finds in the file for each Lon/Lat
position will be displayed. Also positions are not always correct.
This web-app attempts to calculate the Lowest Astronomical Tide to use
as a datum point for each station. This will not always match published
chart datum for your region and datum results are completely incorrect
for some stations.
In summary: Verify location, height and timing of all tidal
stations calculated by this app.
The TICON-4 authors:
Hart-Davis Michael, Dettmering Denise, Seitz Florian (2025). TICON-4:
TIdal CONstants based on GESLA-4 sea-level records. SEANOE.
https://doi.org/10.17882/109129
Piccioni Gaia, Dettmering Denise, Bosch Wolfgang, Seitz Florian
(2019). TICON: TIdal CONstants based on GESLA sea-level records from
globally located tide gauges. Geoscience Data Journal. 6 (2).
97-104.
https://doi.org/10.1002/gdj3.72,
https://archimer.ifremer.fr/doc/00838/94993/
Use the following built in data files:
If choosing this option you'll need a data file of tidal harmonic constituents downloaded to your local device and formatted into a suitable structure.
The required format is the same as the TICON-4 data set. Providing future versions of TICON data use the same format, it should be possible to manually provide future versions using this option.
If the "tide_gauge_name" field in your data set is not optimized for human readability, a metadata file can also be provided to map the name in the harmonic constituents file to a human readable one. The expected file format matches the GESLA data that TICON-4 is based on. Look at "GESLA-4 CSV META-DATA FILE" for an example.
Clicking the button below will download the HARMONICS and HARMONICS.idx files to your browser's Downloads directory.
You many not be notified by your browser so check the Downloads directory after clicking the button.
Download