Stormy Petrel
Storm petrels are small seabirds that appear before big weather. Sailors noticed them showing up ahead of storms, feeding on the chaos of a changing sea. They read the conditions before anyone had a model for it.
Every wave starts with public data. Government buoys measure the swell, NOAA supercomputers model the nearshore and tide tables are published by federal scientists who probably surf. All of it collected with public money, all of it free to access, all of it sitting on government servers waiting for someone to read it.
Somewhere along the way, a company decided that interpreting this data was worth $100 a year. Then they bought every other forecast site and shut them down. Then they put the surf cam behind a 60-second paywall. You know who we’re talking about.
Stormy Petrel is what happens when you get annoyed enough to do something about it.
We take the same NOAA buoys, the same WAVEWATCH III models, the same nearshore predictions, the same tide tables and turn them into a surf forecast you can actually use. No paywall. No “premium tier” that unlocks the cam you used to watch for free five years ago.
The data isn’t a secret. The math isn’t proprietary. A south swell at 15 seconds doesn’t care who’s reading the buoy.
Not sure what a 15-second period means or why swell direction matters? We wrote a few guides to help you read the forecast like a local.
How it works
Every six hours, we pull fresh data from NOAA’s Nearshore Wave Prediction System, WAVEWATCH III spectral models, HRRR 3km wind grids, NDBC buoy observations, and CO-OPS tide predictions. Our interpretation engine scores each spot on swell direction, period, wind quality, and tide state. No one’s selling you a “forecaster’s insight” upgrade.
The methodology is public. The code is on GitHub. If we’re wrong, you can see exactly why and tell us.
What we’re not
We’re not building AI wave detection or surfer tracking or whatever dystopian feature gets announced next quarter.
We’re building the forecast site that should have always existed. The one that treats public data like public data.
Check a spot. If the rating matches what you see at the beach, tell a friend. If it doesn’t, tell us.