With the new version of Subsurface out today, I would like to point to a feature that was already there in 4.7.4, but which just got more usable: Computing deco variations in the planner.
This is motivated by the discussions about Ratio Deco and Deco On The Fly, for a discussion see this post by Rick. These approaches to computing deco are not really attempting to model anything that is supposed to go on in the diver’s body but simply to take a very pragmatic approach and interpolate deco schedules from known ones. If you like, they are (or attempt to be) mnemonics to learn deco plans by heart. The idea is simply that you memorise a reference plan and also how you have to modify deco if you modify the bottom part of your dive.
With Subsurface, you can now do exactly this: You can take any dive that you planned in the planner as reference dive and it will tell you how your total deco time depends on the bottom part. Take for example this trimix dive to 60m with 30min bottom time:
The runtime table says
The important line is the second:
Runtime: 118min, Stop times: + 3:05 /m + 3:59 /min
This tells you how to adjust the total deco time when changing the bottom time (the segment at 30m): For each meter that you go deeper, you have to add about three minutes (for example if you went to 63m for half an hour, you would have to add about 9 minutes or if you only went to 58m you could shorten your deco by 6 minutes). Similarly, if you change the bottom time you have to pay every extra minute on the bottom by about four minutes in deco.
It does not tell you how to distribute this time over the different stops but a good rule of thumb would be to do it roughly proportional to the time you already spend at the stops. So for example, of the about 90min of total deco time you spend roughly half at 6m, you would also add half of the extra time at this last stop.
These numbers are supposed to be something like the partial derivative of the total deco time with respect to depth and duration of the bottom time element (actually: the last manually entered part of the dive). You are supposed to multiply these derivative with the actual variation of the bottom segment that you do.
How do we compute these numbers? When this calculation is enabled, Subsurface actually computes five extra plans: It first computes the original plan, but now with second resolution of the stops instead of minute resolution. Then it shortens the bottom segment by one minute and computes the plan (again to seconds) and then computes a plan for a bottom time extended by one minute. Then it computes to more plans for one meter shallower and one meter deeper.
This give us two time differences both for depth and duration variations. What is displayed is the average of those. But a bit of experimentation shows that the difference is typically only a few seconds (and what are seconds for 90min deco?). This is also a measure how good this linear approximation is (as this the quadratic correction): It gives me confidence to say this approximation isn’t too bad for a few minutes or a few meters.
So having these two numbers also on the runtime table should give the diver much more confidence in how to react to unforeseen changes of plan (both shallower and deeper and shorter and longer). But of course, always remember: Plan the dive, dive the wreck, wreck the plan!