About The Beach Score

Where the data comes from

• Weather, UV, wind, sunrise and sunset — Open-Meteo.
• Sea-surface temperature and waves — the Open-Meteo marine model.
• Great Lakes water temperature — NOAA GLERL's Great Lakes Surface Environmental Analysis (GLSEA), a satellite analysis updated daily.
• Tide predictions — NOAA CO-OPS. Every tide page names the station the numbers come from and how far it is from the beach.
• Air quality — AirNow.

How the Beach Day Score works

We score three daytime windows — morning, midday, and afternoon — on weather, water, safety, and timing, and show the best one. When a data source is unavailable we exclude it and say so, rather than filling the gap with an assumption. A beach with missing data will show a lower-confidence score, never an inflated one.

What it can't tell you

These are model forecasts and tide predictions, not measurements at the water's edge. Local effects — rip currents, bacteria advisories, jellyfish, closures — are not captured here. Always follow posted signs and lifeguard guidance.

Tide stations

NOAA does not have a tide station at every beach. Where the nearest station sits in a bay, river, or the Intracoastal Waterway, tide times and heights can differ from the open beach — sometimes by hours. We say so directly on those pages rather than presenting the number as if it were measured at the shore.

Coverage

We cover 154 US beaches — ocean coasts plus the Great Lakes. The lakes are non-tidal (their astronomical tide is under two inches), so lake pages explain water movement instead of publishing a tide table, and their water temperature comes from NOAA GLERL's daily satellite analysis rather than the hourly ocean model.