About the data

One town, one official station

Each of our 166 pages is tied to a single NOAA CO-OPS station, matched by hand. The nearest station is often the wrong one: at Myrtle Beach a station in the Intracoastal Waterway sits 2.7 km away and the ocean pier 6.8 km away, and the waterway runs more than an hour behind the beach. Where the station sits away from the town, the page says so.

We use both reference stations, which carry their own harmonic constants, and subordinate stations, which NOAA publishes from a reference station plus official offsets. Each page names which kind it is showing.

Towns we leave out

A town with no official station gets no page. Estimating tide times would be a safety risk, so we would rather show nothing. That currently costs us21 entries, including well-searched places such as Cannon Beach, Oceanside and Morro Bay — NOAA simply publishes no prediction for them.

Credit and limits

Tide predictions come from the NOAA Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services. The data are in the public domain; NOS requests that attribution be given whenever NOS material is reproduced and re-disseminated, and provides the data “as is” without warranties.

Not for navigation. That warning is ours, not NOAA’s. For anything you do on the water, the official NOAA station page is the one that counts, and every page here links straight to it.