Albany
South Coast, WA · City of Albany · Relative human–shark interaction conditions
Experimental · uncalibrated
Evidence freshness: 18 Sept 2026, 11:27 pm
Dominant evidence class for the index: Environmental habitat suitability
Why?
- •No live shark detections — this is not an operational alert
- •Water temperature (~17.8°C) favours great white shark thermal suitability
Shark interaction risk is assessed as MODERATE (public index 34.5/100) with moderate combined confidence. Primary drivers: No live shark detections — this is not an operational alert; Water temperature (~17.8°C) favours great white shark thermal suitability. No live shark-detection feed is connected. This is an experimental development assessment, not an operational warning. Always follow lifeguard instructions, beach closures, and official WA SharkSmart / DPIRD advice. vShark is not a government or SLSA product.
Species conditions
Temperate southern hypothesis: white-shark (Carcharodon carcharias) habitat-suitability considerations are expected to weigh more heavily than tropical species. Hypothesis to be tested — not encoded as fact.
Recent detections / sightings
No shark observations are stored for this location. That is a data gap, not evidence that sharks are absent. SharkSmart WA is not machine-connected.
CACHED rows are curated public notices, not a live tagged-shark feed, and do not enter the 0–100 as live detections.
Environmental state
No environmental observations stored yet. Open-Meteo ingest writes to a regional centroid.
Human exposure
- Class
- estimated
- Popularity proxy
- moderate
- Model exposure
- 0.45
Activity classes: swimming, surfing, shore fishing, diving
Estimated, not observed counts. No false precision.
Persistent spatial context
- beach
- harbour
- headland
Geomorphology is persistent context, not a transient observation.
Data gaps
- turbidity proxy
- live detections
- recent detections
Missing data reduces confidence; it does not mean low risk.
Nearby locations
- Denmark48.9 km
- Walpole105.2 km
- Bremer Bay153.5 km
- Hopetoun237.7 km
- Augusta261.5 km
- Australind278.6 km
Data coverage
Where vShark knows little is as important as where it knows more. Missing coverage does not mean low risk.
- Shark observation coverageNONE
SharkSmart WA / DPIRD detections are not machine-connected. No live tagged detections in vShark.
- Ocean coverageMODERATE
Open-Meteo marine SST and wave height at a regional centroid — not a beach sensor.
- Weather coverageMODERATE
Open-Meteo forecast weather at a regional centroid.
- Ecology coverageLOW
No live prey, whale, seal or productivity feed. Seasonal notes are hypotheses or climatology.
- Human exposure coverageLOW
Estimated from popularity class, weekday/weekend and swell. Not a head-count.
- Sensor coverageNONE
No acoustic, camera, drone or eDNA adapters connected.
- Historical coverageLOW
Incident reconstructions are added as frozen validation cases, not a complete history.
NOW / HISTORY — recent assessments
Append-only model outputs. New model versions do not rewrite these rows.
| When | Band | Index | Confidence | Model |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 18 Sept 2026, 11:27 pm | MODERATE | 34.5 | MODERATE | 0.1.0-dev |
| 18 Sept 2026, 8:29 pm | MODERATE | 25.4 | MODERATE | 0.1.0-dev |
Evidence hierarchy
- Direct recent detection — Tagged receiver, verified instrument detection, or equivalent in the relevant window.
- Verified sighting — Sighting confirmed by a responsible authority or trained observer.
- Multiple corroborated observations — Independent reports that agree in space and time.
- Strong ecological proxy — Prey aggregation, carcass, or similar with documented association — still a proxy.
- Environmental habitat suitability — Temperature, depth, and similar suitability — not presence.
- Historical seasonal association — Climatology / phenology prior. Not a live observation.
- Long-term background prevalence — Baseline occurrence in the region. Weakest for now-casting.
Methodology
Relative interaction risk, not attack probability. Official advice outranks this page. Methodology · Data sources