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Citing and licence

The licence is MIT, so you owe us nothing. If the library saved you a week, a line in your reference list is the whole favour we are asking for, and it should name the version you ran rather than the project in general.

If it was useful, cite the version

There is no DOI and no accompanying paper. We would rather admit that than mint a citation that points at a moving target: amplitudes from 0.6 and from 0.9.3 differ for the same input, because the nodal handling changed in between, and a reference without a version number makes that difference impossible to trace.

@software{tidalcore_0_9_3,
  author  = {Lindqvist, Hanna and Oyelaran, Marek},
  title   = {tidalcore: harmonic analysis of water-level time series},
  version = {0.9.3},
  year    = {2026},
  url     = {https://tidalcore.dev/},
  note    = {MIT licence}
}

As a plain sentence in a methods section:

Harmonic analysis was performed with tidalcore 0.9.3 (MIT licence),
fitting 37 constituents by weighted least squares with the 18.61-year
nodal correction applied; samples flagged 3, 4, 5 and 9 were excluded.

That sentence is a template worth copying because of its second half. Constituent count, weighting and exclusions are the three things a reader needs in order to reproduce an amplitude, and they are the three things usually left out.

Licence

MIT Licence

Copyright (c) 2024-2026 the tidalcore maintainers

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicence, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER
DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

In practice this means you may use it commercially, modify it, vendor it into a closed product and never tell us. The one obligation is to keep the notice above with the code. The one thing the licence cannot give you is a guarantee about the numbers, which is why the overview says plainly that this is not a tool for navigation.

Who maintains it

Two people, Hanna Lindqvist and Marek Oyelaran, working on it in the gaps between other duties. No institution stands behind the project and none is implied by anything here. That is relevant to you in one practical way: a bug report may wait a fortnight, and a feature request that nobody needs for their own records will probably wait forever. Reports with a file attached get looked at first, because they can be reproduced.

Write to info@tidalcore.dev. There is no issue tracker on this site, no account to create and no form to fill in anywhere; the site is static by design and keeps no logs beyond what the web server writes.

Two acknowledgements

The constituent speeds in the bundled catalogue are standard values from the astronomical argument tables used across the field for a century. They are not our work and are not in any sense a contribution of this project; the catalogue is a transcription, and a transcription error in MU2 survived from 0.1.0 until 0.5.2.