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 records forecasts before the swell arrives and scores them afterwards against what stations reported, publishing the raw predicted-vs-observed pairs openly once the record spans a full month of wall-clock-recorded forecasts. Important: raw buoy readings are offshore swell height, not breaking wave height at the beach.