Product direction: weather alerts, water quality along the whole coast, and the beach experience

[h0ffmann]

marola.dev answers one question today: is this beach good for swimming, hour by hour? It does
that for three areas (Florianópolis, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador). It combines sea, wind, waves, tide,
jellyfish, whales and each state's bathing-water bulletin into one score per beach per hour, with
no server and no tracking.

This thread is about where it goes next. I see three directions. Please answer per section, and
pick the order. Each decision here becomes a MIP or an issue, not a commitment made in comments.

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1. Weather alerts

Why. A score that ignores an official warning is worse than no score. When INMET or the Navy
says a storm, gale or ressaca is coming, that should be the first thing a visitor sees, above
any "best hour".

What exists.

• MIP-0034: INMET's live warning feed (CAP) as an expiring alert banner, filtered to coastal
  events (coastal winds, gales, storms, heavy rain).
• MIP-0062: ressaca, a deterministic storm-surge veto in the score at the wave height where the
  Navy issues its warning.
• marola-site#10: an Alerts page, starting with RJ's severity report of 2026-09-29.

Proposal. Ship alerts before any new score feature. Show a banner on the map when an active
warning covers the area, an Alerts page listing current warnings per area, and ressaca folded
into the score.

Open questions.

• Banner only, page only, or both? Should a severe warning grey out the "best hour" entirely?
• Sources beyond INMET: the Navy's (DHN/CHM) maritime warnings, and the states' civil defence?
• Should alerts be pushed once the Telegram bot exists (Phase 1), or stay on the site?

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2. Water quality: three states solid, then the whole coast

Why. Water quality is the one input a visitor cannot judge by looking at the sea. It is also
where marola is already most useful.

Where we are: three states.

State	Agency	Status
Santa Catarina	IMA/SC	JSON feed plus a PDF backup, cached
Rio de Janeiro	INEA	PDF bulletins (MIP-0031, MIP-0067). Reads "no data" since the build left Brazil: INEA only answers Brazilian addresses (marola-site#4, fix in progress via a proxy in Brazil)
Bahia	INEMA	PDF bulletin plus a hand-curated coordinate table. Same Brazil-only problem as INEA

Proposal.

1. Make the three states solid first. Fix Never recommend the dark; drop tide-turn noise; explain IMPROPRIA label #4. Finish MIP-0067: every INEA zone, Niterói, Cabo
   Frio, and real bulletin dates. Make "no data" never show without saying why.
2. Then all 17 coastal states, from Amapá to Rio Grande do Sul. MIP-0056 (OODS) is the shape:
   one adapter per state agency, raw bulletins kept versioned, one common view. Each state is its
   own small project: find the bulletin, parse it, curate the point coordinates.

Open questions.

• In what order after the three? By beach-goers (São Paulo, Pernambuco, Ceará first?), or by how
  easy each agency's data is to read?
• Do we survey all 17 agencies first (format, update frequency, licence) before writing any
  adapter?
• What does the map say for a state whose agency publishes nothing usable? An honest "this state
  does not publish", rather than "no data"?
• Coordinates: the hand-curated tables don't scale to 17 states. Who maintains them, and how are
  they reviewed?

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3. The beach experience

Why. "Can I swim?" gets someone to the page. "Is it worth going?" is what brings them back.

What exists.

• MIP-0009: wave markers, with every aspect on hover.
• MIP-0021: parking, toilets, showers and lifeguards from OSM, shown only where the data exists.
• MIP-0030: coastal trails.
• MIP-0054: Portuguese first, a release blocker.
• MIP-0044: the site sections (About, Donate, News, Alerts).

Proposal. Keep the five-second rule: title, one line, map, one obvious tap. Grow depth behind
the tap, in the beach card, not on the map. Candidates for the card:

• Facilities and accessibility.
• How to get there.
• Sea and water temperature.
• The next good window if today is bad.
• Photos and sightings once the bot (Phase 1) collects them.

Open questions.

• What is the one thing missing from the card today? Every maintainer, pick one.
• Crowding, parking pressure and noise: worth estimating, or out of scope?
• Accessibility as a first-class filter ("beaches with a ramp and a lifeguard"), or card detail only?

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Sequencing, against the phases

docs/PHASES.md says work serves the current phase. My suggested order:

1. Alerts.
2. The three water-quality states, solid.
3. The beach card.
4. The coast-wide water-quality expansion, one state at a time.

Disagree with the order, or tell me which direction you would drop entirely.

[h0ffmann]

To add into the discussion - more user friendly tools, like Q&A / ELI5 bot as described in #398