Can’t make this stuff up

Daylight saving time is the practice of advancing clocks to make better use of the longer daylight available during summer. While this has been occurring in the USA for over a century, the federal government is still figuring out how to change their clock.

Tide Tracker, a free web application that relies on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), identified a time error on official tide pages published by the agency.

While testing Tide Tracker, the developers noticed that predicted high- and low-tide times displayed in their app differed by exactly one hour from those shown on the NOAA station page for the San Francisco Tide Station.

The app developers contacted NOAA which was aware of the issue and working on it.  The problem appears limited to how NOAA’s station pages display the times, which currently do not adjust for daylight saving time.

“Like essentially all tide apps, we rely heavily on NOAA data,” said Tide Tracker’s lead designer, Louis Benainous. “Our first assumption was that we had introduced a bug. It took quite a bit of investigation before we realized the discrepancy was coming from the station page itself.”

The discovery underscores a long-standing principle of seamanship: “The prudent mariner will not rely solely on any single aid to navigation.”