Hi all — I built https://watertemperaturelive.com, a site showing current water temperatures and tide predictions for about 20 monitored U.S. coastal and Great Lakes locations. Data comes from official sources: NOAA CO-OPS pier/harbor stations, NDBC buoys, USGS gauges, and NASA/JPL's daily MUR satellite sea-surface analysis.
The problem I'm trying to solve is provenance confusion. Most water-temp sites show one number. But a pier thermometer at La Jolla (NOAA 9410230) and a 1km satellite analysis pixel offshore are very different things. Right now, for example, the La Jolla pier reads 72.9°F (observed Oct 23, 3:24 PM PDT) — above the station's usual October 90th percentile of 67.8°F (2021–2025). A satellite pixel a few km offshore could easily read differently, and neither is 'wrong' — they're different measurements.
So every number on the site carries a label: station ID, observation time, and whether it's a direct observation or a satellite analysis, plus a seasonal baseline band so you can tell when today's reading is unusual. Example page: https://watertemperaturelive.com/us/california/la-jolla/?utm_source=dev-community&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=water_resources
Disclosure: I'm the owner/builder of the site — posting for feedback, not just traffic. (I used AI assistance to help draft this post.)
My question: how would you label observed vs. analyzed values so a casual visitor (not a data person) instantly gets the difference? Right now I use badges like 'pier reading' vs 'satellite analysis' plus the station ID. Is that enough, or would you do something more explicit in the UI? Also curious how others handle mobile layout for data-dense pages — the tide tables get cramped.
— Eric McWay
Top comments (1)
관측값과 위성 분석값을 같은 숫자처럼 놓지 않은 점이 좋네요. 모바일에서는 배지에 측정 방식과 갱신 시각을 먼저 보이고, 펼치면 위치·관측소 ID를 보여주면 구분이 쉬울 것 같습니다. 같은 위치의 직접 비교가 아닌 경우도 화면에서 명확히 알려주면 좋겠어요.