Data sources and attribution

Every data page on BiminiIslands.com is built from a source the site is licensed to use, and each source is credited the way it asks to be. This page lists them. Sections of the site open one at a time, so a source can appear here before the page that uses it has opened. Any page that shows data from one of these sources carries the same credit.

NOAA and the National Weather Service

The National Weather Service publishes its pages and data in the public domain, and its disclaimer and use page sets three conditions: don't claim the information as your own, don't use it in a way that implies endorsement by or affiliation with NOAA or the NWS, and don't modify it and present it as official. This site keeps all three, and names the source on every block.

What we use:

• The forecast numbers for the grid cell over Bimini: wind, gusts, wave height and period, swell, air temperature and chance of rain, and the same numbers for the cells along the Florida to Bimini line. These are presented as National Weather Service grid data, because the forecast zone the cell sits in excludes the territorial waters of The Bahamas by name.
• The National Hurricane Center's offshore waters forecast for zone AMZ075, "Northern Bahamas from 24N to 27N", which covers Bimini and carries its own issue time.
• The NWS Miami coastal waters forecast for the Florida side of the crossing, from the shore out to 60 nautical miles.
• Observations from three nearby stations in the network of NOAA's National Data Buoy Center. No station in that network sits at Bimini, so each reading is labelled with its place and distance: SPGF1 at Settlement Point on Grand Bahama, the network's nearest in The Bahamas, about 70 miles north, for wind, air temperature and pressure; 41122, a wave buoy off Hollywood Beach, about 53 miles west, for waves and water temperature; and VAKF1, NOAA's station at Virginia Key, about 54 miles west, for wind and water temperature. The Hollywood Beach buoy belongs to the Coastal Data Information Program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which lets its data be redistributed and used without restriction; the buoy's credit is below.

Every request to the Weather Service's API carries a User-Agent that names BiminiIslands.com and a contact address. Beside every block of this data sits a link to the official Bahamian forecast.

Credit: National Weather Service and National Hurricane Center data, public domain, used with no endorsement implied.

Credit for the Hollywood Beach buoy: Coastal Data Information Program (CDIP), Scripps Institution of Oceanography, station 265. CDIP is primarily supported by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE).

NOAA tide predictions

Tide predictions come from NOAA's Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services, CO-OPS, for two stations: TEC4617, North Bimini, and TEC4615, North Cat Cay, which serves Cat Cay, Gun Cay and Honeymoon Harbour. CO-OPS publishes highs and lows only for these stations, so that is what the tide page shows.

Credit: Tide predictions: NOAA CO-OPS, station TEC4617, North Bimini

Credit: Tide predictions: NOAA CO-OPS, station TEC4615, North Cat Cay

Three things about these numbers. They're predictions. Both are subordinate stations, whose times and heights are offsets from a reference station, and North Bimini's reference station, Settlement Point on Grand Bahama, was removed in 2001, so no live water level stands behind them. And wind and pressure move real water levels. The tide page says the same.

National Hurricane Center

Two pages lean on the National Hurricane Center. The live tracker reads active storms from the NHC's own feeds: position, intensity, forecast track, and the watches and warnings in force. Watches and warnings appear exactly as the NHC states them, with the advisory number and the issue time, and are never reworded here. The storm-history page is generated from HURDAT2, the NHC's best-track archive, which holds every Atlantic track since 1851. That archive is reanalysed, so an entry can change between releases.

Credit: National Hurricane Center, public domain, no endorsement implied. Storm history from HURDAT2, a reanalysed archive whose entries can change between releases.

Sea-surface temperature, NASA JPL

Water temperature comes from jplMURSST41, a daily analysis produced at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and served through NOAA CoastWatch's ERDDAP. It runs one day behind, so the figure shown is yesterday's. Its acknowledgement, printed wherever the figure appears:

Credit: These data were provided by JPL under support by NASA MEaSUREs program.

Bahamas Department of Meteorology

The Bahamas Department of Meteorology issues the official forecast for Bimini. Its public, marine and tropical-storm messages are posted as dated PDFs with no feed behind them, so this site links to them and reproduces none of them. The link sits beside every weather and hurricane block.

OpenStreetMap

The business directory's listings and the location of every place profile come from OpenStreetMap. No coordinate on this site is typed by hand.

Credit: © OpenStreetMap contributors

The data is under the Open Database License, which asks that a database derived from it be shared on the same terms, so the database of Bimini listings this site builds is available on request through the contact page. Two limits. No business is added to OpenStreetMap from this site; a correction sent to us fixes our listing only. And nothing here implies that OpenStreetMap endorses this site, which its license grants no right to do.

OurAirports

Airport reference data is public domain, from OurAirports: South Bimini Airport is IATA BIM and ICAO MYBS, and the seaplane base on North Bimini is NSB.

US Naval Observatory

Sun and moon times come from the Astronomical Applications Department of the US Naval Observatory, public domain, or are computed in code from the same astronomy.

Official Bahamian sources read for one fact

The Bahamas Customs Department's pleasure vessel page is linked as the current source for cruising and fishing permits and what they cost. The one thing this site reads from it is the date the page was last modified. No fee is ever copied, because the fees have changed more than once and two Customs documents give different length thresholds. Its ports of entry page is linked the same way.

The fisheries regulations on the Bahamas legislation site are the citation for closed seasons, catch and vessel limits and gear rules. The fishing-rules page states them with that citation and a link to the official text.

Research and reference sources

Where a page states the great hammerhead season at Bimini, the source is a peer-reviewed study in Frontiers in Marine Science, published in 2017 under a CC BY license, and the page cites it in full.

The place profiles cite their history sources by name: Nature (1971) and Skeptical Inquirer (2004) on the Bimini Road; the NTSB's report AAR-07/04 on the Chalk's seaplane crash; the US House of Representatives history office on Adam Clayton Powell Jr.; Smithsonian Magazine (2013) on the Fountain of Youth; and Reuters (2006) on the Compleat Angler fire. Where they disagree, as they do on the Bimini Road stone and the Sapona's launch year, the page says so.

Fishing seasons by species have no government or scientific source. Where a page carries a season table, it comes from Bimini Big Game Club's calendar and from Salt Water Sportsman, is attributed to them by name, and is never stated as official.

Linked, never read by a script

Baleària Caribbean's route page is the source for sailing days, times and fares. All of those are linked and none is typed here. The company's terms bar automated extraction of its data for commercial purposes, so nothing on this site reads it. Direct Ferries and ferrytobahamas.com resell the same route. "Bimini Fast Ferry" is a reseller's label, and "Bahamas Fast Ferry" is a parked domain.

Resorts World Bimini's ship calendar is linked from the cruise-port pages and read by nothing, because its host's robots file disallows all crawling. The airlines' own sites are linked for schedules and never read.

Operator and resort sites are read once per build phase to confirm a business is trading. Several look-alike Bimini domains are parked or hijacked, so only a confirmed address is linked.

Not used

• Flight-schedule data services: OpenSky, aviationstack, FlightAware AeroAPI and AeroDataBox. None allows free commercial use.
• Cruise aggregators, whose terms prohibit automated collection.
• Tournament pages. They are hand-edited, they disagree on dates, and no feed carries Bimini events.
• NASA POWER climate normals. Their terms were unread when the site was built, so a climate-by-month page waits.
• Marina dock schedules, because none exist.

Written pages

The guides are written from primary sources: the operator's own pages, government and scientific sources, open data and OpenStreetMap. Fares, sailing times, fees, prices and opening hours are never typed into them; each page links the organization that sets them.

Found a problem with the data?

Tell us which page and what looks wrong through the contact page. If the error is in the source itself, we'll say so and point you to who can fix it.