Everything on this site comes from two public NOAA feeds. Neither costs anything, neither requires a key, and neither is operated by us — which is the first limitation worth stating plainly.
This is a portfolio demonstration
Do not use this site for navigational, safety, or operational decisions. It is a demonstration of how a WordPress site can be built around live data. It carries no service guarantee, no uptime commitment, and no verification beyond what the instruments themselves report. For decisions that matter, go to the source: NOAA CO-OPS and NDBC.
Where each number comes from
| Measurement | Source | Updated |
|---|---|---|
| Tide / water level | NOAA CO-OPS gauge | every 6 minutes |
| Tide predictions | NOAA CO-OPS | hourly, computed ahead |
| Wave height, period, direction | NDBC buoy | every 10 minutes |
| Wind, air and water temperature, pressure | NDBC buoy | every 10 minutes |
Each station pairs a tide gauge with the nearest wave buoy, because no single NOAA product carries both. The two instruments are not in the same place — sometimes tens of miles apart — so a tide reading and a wave reading from one station describe nearby but distinct pieces of water.
Gaps are normal, and are shown as gaps
Buoy instruments fail, get serviced, or were never installed. NDBC publishes a missing-value marker for these, and it is common rather than exceptional: across a recent sample of roughly 1,900 readings, wave height was missing about a third of the time, wave period closer to half, and air temperature about half.
This site never renders a missing reading as zero. A metric with no current data says so, and keeps the space a number would occupy. Crescent City is the standing example: buoy 46027 carries no water temperature sensor at all, so that figure is permanently absent there rather than briefly wrong.
Freshness is tracked per measurement, not per station. Two figures on the same card can legitimately disagree about what time it is, because each one shows the most recent reading that actually exists for that instrument.
Units
Readings are stored in metric and in UTC, and converted for display. NDBC publishes some products in metric and others in imperial; storing one canonical form means the conversion happens once, in one place, rather than wherever it was convenient.
When the feeds go down
NOAA outages happen. This site keeps the last reading it successfully retrieved and labels it with its real age — “no data since 2:10 pm” rather than a stale number presented as current. The status page shows exactly when each source last ran and what it returned.