About
About Bluegraph
Bluegraph is a reference for the observations of NOAA's National Data Buoy Center and its partners: buoys, coastal stations, tide gauges and estuary stations from the Bering Sea to American Samoa and the Great Lakes to the Caribbean, every measurement they report charted over up to a year, and their directional wave spectra analysed.
- Active stations
- 758
- Reported in the last 3 hours
- 723
- Publish directional spectra
- 166
- Regions
- 11
What it holds
Every 30 minutes Bluegraph reads each active station's latest data and keeps the new readings. From NDBC's realtime files: the standard meteorological observations and wave summaries since April 2025, and the full directional wave spectra since August 2026. At tide gauges, NOAA CO-OPS's six-minute water levels and tide predictions since September 2025. At estuary stations, the National Estuarine Research Reserves' water quality, every fifteen minutes, since August 2026. And near shore, hourly surface currents from the national HF radar network since June 2026.
NDBC's realtime files cover only the last 45 days; Bluegraph keeps everything it has read. After 90 days readings are kept on the hour, and tide gauges' water levels after 60 days; directional spectra and wave summaries are kept whole.
A daily audit marks stations that have stopped reporting as inactive, and active again when they return.
Pages
- Network
- The stations on a globe, their latest waves, and what stands out now.
- Stations
- Every station's latest readings by region, searchable and sortable.
- Station pages
- Every measurement a station reports, charted from 24 hours to a year and downloadable, beside a 3D sea synthesised from its measured wave spectrum: the heights, periods and directions are real, the exact positions of the crests are not.
- Wave Intelligence
- The wave systems in each spectrum: swell and wind sea, their tracks, the storms that raised them, crossing seas and crest length.
- Storms
- The storms of the last month placed from the swell they sent to two or more buoys, their swell's crossing replayed on a globe.
- Compare
- Up to four stations on one time axis, for every metric they report.
- Query
- SQL over the readings, run in the browser against the published data files, which anyone can download.
- Ask
- Questions about the observations in plain words, as a conversation with follow-ups. A language model writes a query for each question, which runs in your browser over the same data files, and words the answer from the rows it returns: every value in an answer is filled in from those rows, and each answer opens the data and the query behind it. Questions are sent to a language model service. Ask describes what was measured; it doesn't forecast.
- Reference
- What each measurement is, how NDBC takes it, and how Bluegraph analyses it.
The data
Observations and wave spectra come from NOAA's National Data Buoy Center, which also serves its partners' stations: the IOOS regional associations' buoys, Environment and Climate Change Canada's lake buoys, and the National Estuarine Research Reserves' water quality. Tide gauges' water levels and predictions come from NOAA CO-OPS; surface currents from the national HF radar network's hourly grids, served by NDBC.
The sea level page also draws on British Columbia's tide gauges, from the Canadian Hydrographic Service; on gauges from the equator to Central America, from the University of Hawaii Sea Level Center's fast delivery data (Caldwell, Merrifield and Thompson, 2015, doi:10.7289/V5V40S7W); on San Diego's monthly means since 1906, from NOAA CO-OPS; and on satellite sea level from NOAA CoastWatch (from RADS; Sentinel data courtesy of the Copernicus Programme; generated using AVISO+ products), fetched for the page and not kept. British Columbia's gauges contain intellectual property (Data) of the Canadian Hydrographic Service; copyright His Majesty the King in Right of Canada. They are not for navigation.
Realtime data are provisional: their providers have not yet quality-controlled them. Bluegraph is independent and not affiliated with NOAA.
Coastlines are from Natural Earth; place names on the location charts from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0).
Who makes it
Made and maintained by Brandon Huey.
Contact
Questions, corrections or bug reports are welcome.