Live on the globe now: 857 tracked
This layer plots the marine buoys and coastal stations of NOAA's National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) on the live globe, each dropped at its real moored position. Click a buoy to inspect its most recent observation: significant wave height, dominant and average wave period, wind speed, gusts and direction, sea-surface (water) temperature, air temperature, barometric pressure and dewpoint. Buoys that aren't currently reporting a given value are left blank rather than guessed at.
The data comes straight from NDBC's "latest observations" feed (latest_obs.txt), the same public text file the agency publishes for its global network of moored buoys and fixed platforms. We poll it about every 10 minutes, so what you see tracks the buoys' own reporting cadence closely; stale stations drop off the globe automatically until they report again. Positions and readings are shown as published — no smoothing, interpolation or forecasting.
It's a concrete way to read the ocean's surface state in near real time: confirm a swell building off a coastline, check water temperature before a passage, or watch wind pick up across an open-water mooring. Ocean buoys are one of roughly 29 live layers you can toggle on the same spinnable, zoomable Earth.
Data source: NOAA NDBC
From NOAA's National Data Buoy Center (NDBC), via its public latest-observations text feed at ndbc.noaa.gov. It covers NDBC's network of moored buoys and fixed coastal/offshore stations, mostly around the United States and partner regions, not every buoy in every ocean.
Per station we show significant wave height, dominant and average wave period, wind speed, gusts and direction, sea-surface (water) temperature, air temperature, barometric pressure and dewpoint. Any value a buoy isn't currently measuring is left blank instead of filled in.
We pull NDBC's latest_obs feed about every 10 minutes, and individual buoys report on their own schedules. So readings are near real time but not second-by-second, and a station that stops sending data is removed from the globe until it returns.
No. Values are shown exactly as NDBC publishes them for each station's most recent observation. There's no interpolation, averaging across buoys, or forecasting in this layer.