About Beach Tide Charts

Tide charts for 93 US beach towns, made for people going to the beach rather than out on a boat.

Where the numbers come from

Every high and low tide time and height is a prediction from NOAA's Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (CO-OPS), pulled once a year for each station. Heights are in feet above mean lower low water (MLLW). Times are shown in each town's local time, with daylight saving applied, whatever time zone your device is in.

Each town is matched by hand to one NOAA station. The nearest station is often a creek, bridge or Intracoastal Waterway gauge whose tides run hours apart from the ocean beach, so we pick the ocean-side gauge where one exists and say on the page how far away it is and why it was chosen.

What we calculate

  • Tide curves are drawn through NOAA's predicted highs and lows with a smooth cosine curve. NOAA publishes the turning points; the shape between them is ours.
  • Low tide in daylight: the hours between sunrise and sunset when the curve is within 1 ft of a low tide (or a third of the fall into the low, where the range is small).
  • Tide-pool days: daylight lows below 0.0 ft, shown only for towns with a rocky shore.
  • Sunrise, sunset and moon phases are computed with the open-source SunCalc library.

None of these are official NOAA products. Live water levels, where shown, come straight from NOAA's API when you open the page and are preliminary observations.

Not for navigation

Predictions do not include the effect of wind, storms or river flow, which can move the real water level well away from the table. Do not use this site for navigation, boating or any decision where safety depends on the water level.

Photo credits

Photos are from Unsplash, used under the Unsplash License, and colour-graded by us. They show the mood of a beach town, not the town on the page.