Who builds this, and how
BreakAtlas reads public NOAA data every morning and turns it into one page per spot. No readings are estimated, and no gap is filled with something plausible.
Christoph Ballmer
Builds and checks BreakAtlas
Builds daily report sites from public NOAA data — and names the station behind every number.
The four rules this site is built on
- Nothing is invented. Every reading names its station and the time it was taken. Where a source is silent, the page says so instead of showing a plausible value.
- Measurements and models are kept apart. Buoy readings are measurements. WaveWatch III is a model, and it is labelled as one — when a buoy is offline, the page says model only.
- One page per spot. Report, forecast, water temperature and cam live on the same URL with jump links. No second page competing with the first.
- Safety content follows the agency. Rip current and beach condition wording stays close to the National Weather Service. That is the one part of this site with no surf slang in it.
Where the data comes from
- NOAA NDBC — buoy readings: wave height, period, direction, water temperature
- NOAA WaveWatch III — the wave model behind the forecast
- NOAA CO-OPS — tide predictions and coastal water temperature
- National Weather Service — wind, weather and the surf zone forecast
All four are public domain US government sources. Cameras are not ours: where a spot has a publicly embeddable stream, it is embedded with the operator's terms respected; otherwise the page links to the operator instead.
Also built by the same hand
- howsthebite.com — Daily US water reports from the same NOAA and USGS stack
- angelpuls.de — German fishing portal
- angelpuls.ch — Swiss edition
Corrections
If a number here disagrees with what you see at the beach, the water wins. If a station is mapped to the wrong spot, that is worth fixing for everyone — the contact route is through the profiles above.