Swimming with Elvis: Part 2
The Why
When spring hits in Washington state, we start thinking about jumping in the lakes here in Seattle! Year over year, I've often considered dropping a network-enabled water temperature gauge into the lake and creating an IOT project to monitor and publish lake water temperature data. Finally in 2024 I decided to dig in on this project.
My first step was to do some research on what has already been done on this front.
My findings were very interesting; I half-expected there to be an API(s) that surfaced lake water temperature data worldwide, or at least nationwide. After looking around quite a bit, and getting some help via email (thank you!) from Ronald Henderson and others at the USGS, it turns out that there apparently isn't a good source of this kind of data, outside of the county level. Interesting, given current climate concerns with regard to surface water temperatures!
This left me focused on the information provided on the King County website here. I found it a bit cumbersome to find what I was looking for (which was a good thing, in terms of substantiating my project), so I reached out and got some help from Curtis DeGasperi, Water Quality Engineer at King County Department of Natural Resources and Parks. They first pointed me to data sources here, but I was looking for more of a real-time data feed, so I followed up with more questions.
Per Curtis' response, I learned that the data sources for the pages here are updated only twice monthly (Mar-Nov) and monthly (Dec-Feb), and it takes ~45 days after each sampling event for the data generated via field and lab analysis to post to the web.
However, I was pointed to the Lake buoy data pages here, learning that real-time lake temperatures could be found by scrolling-over the buoy locations. Cool!
After reading about the buoy specifications here, researching their costs online, and reviewing the very well done maintenance and quality assurance plan here I came to the happy conclusion that researching, finding, buying and dropping my own sensor into the lake would not be the best next step; I decided to proceed with leveraging the data King County rigorously collects, and received permission to do so, noting their disclaimer here.
With all of this research, I landed on a plan to publish lake water temperature data that could be consumed in JSON format by any web-enabled application I might decide to build in the future. I'd get what I primarily wanted, a real-time temperature data JSON file. As a cool added outcome, I'd process all historical temperature data (since 1983) to determine what the all-time recorded high and low temperatures are, and the by-month highs and lows, regardless of year.
You may have noticed that my service posts data to swimming.withelvis.com. In one of my previous startups, I had a saying "with Elvis", e.g. "Next we're going to build a new client app! With Elvis." The idea being that Elvis is a cool legend, and doing anything "with Elvis" would make it that much more fun and better. I got so wrapped up in the idea that I purchased the domain name "withelvis.com", which had been sitting for years, unused. I got a kick out of the "swimming.withelvis.com" idea, and so it is.
Over many years in the startup world, I'd never published my own personal open-source project, and felt this was the perfect candidate and time to do it. So it is!
Ultimately I hope this fun little project serves to help others in some way. Cheers!
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