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Week 4 - New data interface

Week 4 was actually quite short, since we went to Bonnevile dam on Tuesday and had a day off on Friday for 7/4. With most of the plotting backend finished, Jesse and I discussed how users would actually use these tools. He suggested that users should be able to upload their own data, in the form of a csv (comma delimited) text file. That file would contain observation data obtained from stations, with time and a variable (such as salinity). Currently my plotting interface worked with data container files, with data in various arrays in a specific format. So, I began to work on a csv parser tool in Python that would generate data containers from csv files. 

The major event of the week was a meeting with Dr. Baptista on Thursday. I prepared a couple of slides to guide the meeting. During the meeting, I discussed what I had been working on for the past few weeks, my current progress, and my future goals. We then discussed the user interface of the web portion. Dr. Baptista’s idea was that the website would display a Geyer-MacCready plot by default with only the black line for the estuary state. The user would be able to select a year and transect location, then upload data to display a colored line corresponding to that data. For more detail, the user would also be able to click on a specific point on the plot and create a velocity profile plot for that time. I thought this idea was very good, although the last part would be challenging to implement. With that in mind, I planned to finish the csv parser and fix any bugs in my existing code next week, and start the web interface on week 6.