The Tide Comes to VS-SailSim

After searching the web and looking at all options we managed to find some excellent high definition Sydney Tide data, see http://www.tidetech.org/.  They've produced some fantastic high resolution tide prediction data.  A program such as TELEMAC-2D (http://www.telemacsystem.com/) can also be used to produced similar tide data for example the image to the right has been produced using data plotted superimposed on an image of Sydney Harbour (using Lantsat7 data).  The data is for an incoming tide.  The colours show the magnitude of the velocity (red is high velocity) and the vector arrows show the direction (the length of the arrows is also proportional to the velocity magnitude).

So that's the data, next getting it into the simulator, realistically.  After some research into the effects of tide, we were able to model the hydro and aero dynamic effects of tide (both are important for a sailing yacht).  Then we needed to access the tide data efficiently within the confines of low computing resources.  We've achieved this by combining efficient search algorithms with careful code timing.  the result is, tide is modelled with little or no noticable change in computing resource requirements.

The full tide release is being rolled out now.