Help & reference

Quick reference for how Tidevisor pulls its data, how to customize what you see, and what the Pro tier unlocks. Skim the table of contents for the section you need.

What is Tidevisor

Tidevisor is a marine information dashboard for paddlers. It pulls tides, wind, weather, currents, river gauges, and alerts from official sources into a single screen so you can decide whether it’s a paddleable day without bouncing between five apps.

It is not a navigation app, an official safety product, or a substitute for checking the conditions yourself before you launch. The forecast tiles show what the experts predict; the live tiles show the last data the upstream sensors reported. Always verify what you see here against the actual water in front of you.

Where the data comes from

Every tile is backed by a public, government-run data source. We don’t generate any of our own forecasts — the value is in bringing them together, surfacing the relevant slice for paddlers, and gracefully handling sensor outages.

Tides & live water level: NOAA CO-OPS — the same predictions and observations the National Weather Service uses. We point each saved location at the nearest harmonic station (full 6-minute curve plus highs/lows). Some subordinate stations publish only highs/lows; for those we use the nearest harmonic station and surface a note about the time offset.
Forecast, alerts, hourly & 7-day: National Weather Service (NWS) via api.weather.gov. Marine zones drive the offshore advisory banner; coastal zones drive the standard small-craft / gale / storm warnings.
Live wind: NOAA CO-OPS or NDBC buoys, with METAR as a fallback. We probe up to four stations per location in priority order and use the first one with fresh data (less than ~75 minutes old). You can re-rank these in Sources per location.
Tidal currents: NOAA CO-OPS currentswhen a real current station exists nearby (rare on most of the SE US coast). Where one doesn’t exist, we derive a reasonable estimate from the local tide curve.
Offshore waves & sea-surface temp: NDBC buoys for stations that publish wave data; Open-Meteomarine model elsewhere. The model resolution is coarse (~10km) but covers anywhere a buoy doesn’t.
Radar: RainViewer(free tier) — past 2 hours of precipitation overlays from US national radar mosaics. Forecast (nowcast) coverage is unreliable in some regions; see “Known limitations” below.
Tropical systems: National Hurricane Center — active Atlantic basin storms with cone-of-uncertainty awareness when one intersects your location.
Air quality: EPA AirNow — official US AQI for the nearest monitor.
Rivers: USGS Water Services — live discharge / gauge height for any USGS site ID you save.
Sun, moon, twilight, solunar: SunCalc — astronomical calculations from lat/lon and date. No external API call; pure math.
Map imagery: Esri World Imagery via the standard public embed.

We do not pay for any of these sources. If a tile is empty or slow, it’s almost always because the upstream provider is having a moment — not because of anything we can fix client-side.

When data looks stale or wrong

Real sensors break, drift, and go offline. We try to surface that clearly rather than silently showing yesterday’s reading.

Stale dots in the wind / tide / observation picker. When you add or edit a location, candidate stations show a green dot (data within the last hour or two) or an amber dot (no recent data — probably a broken sensor). Picking a station with an amber dot is allowed but you’ll likely see blanks until that sensor comes back online.

Swap a broken source. Open the location picker, tap Sources on the location you want to fix, and select a different station from the candidates list. The change applies immediately to your next dashboard render.

Hidden tiles for inland locations.If you save a spot far from the coast, the marine / buoy / current tiles won’t render because there’s no relevant station nearby. That’s intentional — better an absent tile than a confusing one.

Customizing your dashboard

Locations. Tap the location pill at the top of the dashboard. From there you can search by town or zip, drop a pin on a map, or use your current GPS location. Free accounts can save up to 3 locations; Pro removes the cap.

Data sources per location. Inside the location picker, hit Sources on any saved spot to swap tide / observation / wind / buoy / marine-zone stations. Useful when a sensor goes dark or you want offshore wind instead of a sheltered in-creek station.

Tile layout. Open Preferences (gear icon in the top bar) and scroll to Tile layout. You can hide tiles you don’t use and reorder the rest. Tile reordering is free for all users.

Rivers.Open the Rivers tile’s editor to add or remove USGS site IDs. The defaults are Georgia / South Carolina spots; replace them with whatever you actually paddle.

Units, theme, time format. All in Preferences. Choices sync across devices when signed in; guests get device-local storage instead.

Tidevisor Pro

The free tier is meant to be genuinely useful on its own — one well-curated location, every dashboard tile, customizable layout, daily-briefing email turned off, GPS tracking on the map, no ads, no analytics. Pro adds the convenience features that make the app actively part of your paddling routine.

What Pro includes:

Up to 15 saved locations (vs. 3 on free)
Daily briefing email — one-screen summary delivered at your chosen hour
Custom per-location data source picker
The future Pro Weather tile (forecast radar, wind streamlines, multi-layer toggles)
First crack at upcoming features like trip planning and route tracking

Pricing:

Monthly — $2.99/mo, cancel any time
Annual — $19/year (~47% off vs. monthly)
Lifetime — $59 once, never renews

Manage your subscription any time from the account menu →Manage subscription, which opens Stripe’s billing portal where you can switch plans, update your card, or cancel. See the upgrade page for the full breakdown.

Refunds. Within 7 days of purchase, no questions asked. Email contact@tidevisor.com and we’ll process it.

Beta-tester codes. If someone shared a code with you, sign in, open Preferences from the account menu, and paste it into the Redeem code field at the top. Each code grants a fixed window (typically 30 days) of Pro — no card required.

Troubleshooting

Daily briefing email never arrives.Check three things, in order: (1) the toggle in Preferences → Daily briefing is actually on, (2) the email address on your account is correct (look in the account menu), (3) it’s past the hour you scheduled it for (we deliver within ~5 minutes of the chosen hour, Eastern). If all three check out and you still aren’t getting them, check your spam folder for “Tidevisor” and add the sender to your contacts.

Wind shows “no data” or feels obviously wrong.The station you’re reading from probably went stale. Open the location picker → Sources, and pick a different wind station from the candidates list. Stations with a green dot are reporting fresh data right now.

Dashboard feels slow on first load.The very first request fans out to ~10 upstream APIs. After that, our cache holds most of it for 5 minutes so subsequent loads should be near-instant. If the first load takes more than 10 seconds, usually one of the upstream APIs is throttling — refresh in a minute and it’ll usually clear up.

Pro features didn’t unlock after I paid. Stripe’s confirmation hits us via webhook, which usually completes in a few seconds. If it’s been more than a minute, hard-refresh the dashboard. If still nothing, email contact@tidevisor.com with the email you used at checkout and we’ll sort it manually.

I redeemed a code but don’t see Pro. Try refreshing the dashboard. The redemption is instant on the server side but the in-page Pro badge updates on the next render.

Known limitations

Radar nowcast in the SE US.RainViewer’s free-tier forecast frames are reliably empty for much of the Southeast. We retry, but in practice you’ll usually see only the past 2 hours, not the future. A more reliable nowcast is on the roadmap as part of the Pro Weather tile.

Timezone is currently US Eastern.All “today” math (briefing emails, 30-day tide outlook, the daily window highlights) assumes America/New_York. West Coast paddlers can still use everything; the day boundaries will just be shifted. Per-location timezones are on the roadmap.

Inland-paddler coverage is improving.The resolver still leans coastal — if you save an inland river spot, you may see empty tide or marine tiles. The river gauges and forecast tiles work fine. We’re working on graceful hide-the-irrelevant-tiles behavior.

Nautical chart tile. Temporarily removed from the dashboard while we build a proper chart-based route planner as a Pro feature. The free satellite map (with GPS tracking) still works.

Contact

Bug reports, feature requests, refunds, paddle-club bulk codes — all the same address: contact@tidevisor.com. We’re a small operation; expect a response within a day or two.

For legal questions or data-handling concerns, see our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.