Know the Gulf

Public coastal-conditions dashboard for knowthegulf.com, launching with Panama City Beach, Florida. It combines a user-supplied ALERTBAY/PCBFLAGS historical archive with automatically collected future PCB flag snapshots, Open-Meteo weather/wave context, NOAA tide predictions, and a modeling-ready finalized dataset.

Data lifecycle

1. flag_observations_archive.csv is immutable historical evidence from the supplied archive.
2. poll-current-flag.yml checks the public PCB current-conditions page every 30 minutes from 06:00–22:59 America/Chicago. It logs the first observation of each day and any detected flag change.
3. daily-refresh.yml builds one daily flag row, enriches observed flag days with weather/wave/tide data, and marks recent environmental rows provisional.
4. After the ERA5/ERA5-Ocean lag has passed, provisional environmental rows are replaced with finalized reanalysis rows.
5. Only finalized rows enter model_training.csv.

Safety design

The current official flag is visually separated from all historical statistics and research-model output. Know the Gulf is an informational planning and research project; predictions never override posted flags or official local guidance.

Domain architecture

• knowthegulf.com is the canonical public domain.
• knowthegulf.org should permanently redirect to https://knowthegulf.com/.
• safe2swimpcb.com should permanently redirect to the equivalent https://knowthegulf.com/ path so legacy links and QR codes continue to work.

See DEPLOYMENT.md for the GitHub Actions-based Pages deployment, custom-domain verification, DNS setup, HTTPS, redirect strategy, and first-run automation procedure.