Open Water Data is currently in an early stage of development by Mitch Bechtel.
Read the latest news and join the Open Water Data Discord.
Open Water
This website and coming app are for open water swimmers, paddleboarders, surfers and other beach-goers to check beach conditions. The initial pilot will focus on the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). The long-term goal is to enable users to add beaches and data sources to scale out to anywhere open data is collected by government agencies, organizations and community scientists.
Open Data
Another key goal is to make all collected data available as open data through simple CSV and JSON downloads, as well as COMAND Web Services, which are easy to access and query for any purpose, including research, publication and for other websites and apps.
Data will include:
- Water Quality - E. coli level, Enterococcus level, pH, ORP, conductivity, dissolved oxygen, turbidity and more. This information is gathered from government and community organizations, such as City of Toronto (Beach Water Quality), Swim Drink Fish (Lake Ontario Waterkeeper Toronto Monitoring Hub) and Surfrider Foundation Blue Water Task Force. For a more comprehensive list, see Data Sources.
- Water Conditions - Water temperature, waves and turbidity. This information will be pulled from data sources such as WindFinder, NOAA, and crowd-sourced from smart buoys and participating users' smart watches, such as equipped Garmin Fitness Watches.
- Weather - Current, past and forecast air temperature, wind speed and direction, precipitation, cloud-cover, humidity, barometric pressure. This information will be gathered from open data weather sources, such as Open Weather, National Weather Service and Weather API.
- Locations - Information about beaches, parks and ports, including safety and facilities information, gathered from The Swim Guide, Blue Flag and user contributions.
- Activity - Number of people on the beach and in the water. This information will be based on crowd-sourced data from smart phones, smart watches and other location tracking devices. Google and other open data sources may be used as well.
- Events - Calendar of community and ad-hoc group events at beaches, from local feeds and user posts.
- Photos - Users will be able to share photos of beach locations, conditions, activities and events.
In addition, information and tools will be provided to empower you to gather and share open water data about any body of water you care about, including how to use smart phones, smart watches, smart buoys, personal weather stations, water monitoring kits and monitoring equipment.
Donations
People occasionally ask if I accept donations. While a significant amount of effort has gone into this site, much more has gone into orchestrating, collecting, analyzing and sharing the data behind it. That effort is done by many people and organizations across the globe, but the one most instrumental to me and this site is Swim Drink Fish and the amazing people there. So, please donate to Swim Guide by Swim Drink Fish. Thanks!
The plan is also to make it more clear where various data on this site comes from with links to learn more and potentially donate to them as well.