After a prolonged period of development, we’ve finally put out an article in Limnology and Oceanography: Methods detailing our Open Wave Height Logger project (OWHL). This paper walks through the motivations for the project (low-cost, long-duration water pressure data logging so that we can know what the waves were like at a field site) and the variety of tests we went through during development.

The paper itself is freely available via open access here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/lom3.10370 along with an extensive supplement. We’ve also put the OWHL hardware & software files, plus the data used in the paper, and the R code used to analyze the data and generate the figures in a Zenodo archive available here: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3679063. For the OWHL hardware and software, future updates will be located in the OWHL project Github repository: https://github.com/millerlp/OWHL.

If all of that information is too voluminous to go through at once, we’ve also been putting up most of the supplementary material on the http://owhl.org website.

The analysis of the OWHL data makes use of two R packages that I have written. For the initial data import and cleaning, I use the functions in the owhlR package available on my Github account: https://github.com/millerlp/owhlR . To process the (cleaned and concatenated) pressure data into summary wave statistics, there are functions available in the oceanwaves package available on the central R repository at https://cran.r-project.org/package=oceanwaves, or the development version found here: https://github.com/millerlp/oceanwaves.

If you’re thinking about building your own OWHL, or designing an offshoot version, questions about the design and programming can be directed to me.