About & method

What this site is

Buoy Conditions republishes live observations from NOAA’s National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) network — moored weather buoys, wave buoys, C-MAN and coastal stations in US waters, plus NDBC’s offshore Atlantic hurricane buoys — one answer-first page per station: what the wind, waves and water are doing there right now, how rough the last 24 hours were, and when the station last reported.

Which stations get a page

A station earns a page empirically, never from a registry listing alone: its own recent reports must show observations within the last 7 days (14 for Great Lakes stations, which are hauled out seasonally), and at least one headline reading — wind, waves, or water temperature — must be demonstrably reported. NDBC’s master table lists many stations that are decommissioned, silent, or carry no weather sensors; none of those get pages. The gate re-runs daily, so stations join when they start reporting and stop being listed in the sitemap and hubs after 45 silent days (their pages remain, labeled with the last report date).

Sensor-driven pages

There is no standard buoy: what a station reports depends on its payload and which sensors survived the winter. Each page is assembled from the fields that station demonstrably reports, measured over a trailing window — a station with no wave sensor shows no wave box, rather than an empty one. Values outside physical plausibility bounds are treated as missing, and every value prints the time it was reported.

Freshness

Pages refresh on a 30-minute cycle from NDBC’s latest-observation feed. A station silent more than 6 hours is labeled STALE in words. Tide times shown on station pages are NOAA CO-OPS predictions for the named tide station, fetched live in your browser; they are predictions, not observations.

Sources

Observations: NOAA National Data Buoy Center (ndbc.noaa.gov), US public domain data. Tide predictions: NOAA CO-OPS (tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov). Companion site: Know The Tide — tide predictions for 3,071 US harbors.