NDBC Buoy

NDBC buoys are weather buoys operated by the National Data Buoy Center, part of NOAA. They sit moored in open water up and down the coast and measure significant wave height, dominant wave period, wave direction, wind speed, wind direction, and water temperature in real time. Buoys are the gold standard for current ocean conditions and are a critical input for verifying wave forecasts. Swell Intel compares forecasts against co-located buoys every cycle to compute accuracy metrics like mean absolute error and percent-within-1-foot. Important: raw buoy readings are offshore swell height, not breaking wave height at the beach.