Quick Start Guide to the CTI Tide Editor

The CTI Tide editor is a utility program distributed with SonarWiz used to import and edit tide tables in SonarWiz. Since tide tables can be stored in a wide variety of formats, the CTI Tide Editor uses a template system that makes it easier to import and edit tide data in the formats you use frequently.

Example File

The example file used in this guide is found here. It consists of a 4 line header followed by hourly tide data listed in 4 columns per row. Each row consists of the date of the tide prediction, the time, the word “UTC” and the tide height. The fields are separated by one or more spaces.

Open

Any text format that consists of header rows (to be ignored) and 1 row of data per tide observation can be imported.

Instructions

1. To Import a tide file into a SonarWiz project, Right-Click the Tide Files branch of the Project Explorer and Select Edit/Import Tide Files… This will open the CTI Tide Editor.
   
   

   Open

   

    

2. In the CTI Tide Editor, Click the Import icon in the toolbar and select the text file you wish to import.
   
   

    

3. In the Import dialog, Click the New button in the Templates section and fill out the name of the new template. I called it UKTides in this example. In the future, if you need to import more tide data using the same format, simply select the template you create here.
   
   

    

4. Set the number of header rows to skip over the file header, blank lines and column titles (if any). In this example, we have 4 header rows. We can set the default delimiter to SPACE
   
   

    

5. To define the tide fields we want to import, click the green '+' button in the Fields section and fill out the Field Settings for each column of data starting from the left-most column and working column-by-column to the right. You can skip over irrelevant columns by defining an “Ignore” column field type.
   
   For our example file, the first column is a date. So we set the Tide Date column as shown. Click OK when done. Pay attention to the Field format and delimiter options and set them to match your input file.
   
   

    

6. You should now see the first field added to the Fields list, and the Preview panel will highlight the column in cyan and the delimiter in red. If you made a mistake, click the 'X' button and add the field again with the correct settings.
   
   

    

7. Next, add the Tide Time field:
   
   

    

8. Next, add an Ignored field to skip over the UTC column:
   
   

    

9. Finally, add the Tide Height field:
   
   

    

10. The Fields and Preview panel should indicate that you are parsing the tide file fields properly:
    
    

     

11. Click the Import Tide File button to import the file. The Tide editor should import the tide file and show a tidal curve for 2015-09-18:
    
    

     

12. Give the tide file a Name and Description. If known, add the Latitude and Longitude, time offset between the survey time and tide time, and fill out the Vertical Datum (meta-data only).
    
    

    
    NOTE: the Lat/Lon format is controlled in the Tools | Settings menu. Use the Time offset field if the tide date/time is not in the same time zone as your survey. For example, if the tides are reported in local time but the survey was conducted using UTC.
    
    

13. Click the Save icon in the toolbar to save the file to disk.
    
    

    
    SonarWiz will add the file to the Project Explorer:
    
    

    
    And if the tide station location is in the map view, it will indicate the tide station with an icon:
    
    

     

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