Data sources
Epic Beach Days is built on public weather, marine and safety data. Here's where each piece comes from and how we turn it into a comfort score.
Open-Meteo (opens in a new tab)
Hourly and daily weather forecasts (temperature, wind, UV, cloud cover, precipitation, sunrise/sunset) and marine data (wave height, sea-surface temperature).
Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (opens in a new tab). We use it with attribution and have made changes (see below).
NOAA (CO-OPS) (opens in a new tab)
Tide predictions (high/low times and heights). These are astronomical predictions, not forecasts, so they hold years ahead.
NWS (National Weather Service) (opens in a new tab)
Surf Zone Forecasts, used for rip-current risk.
FWC (Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission) (opens in a new tab)
Red tide (harmful algal bloom) sample data, matched to the nearest recent sample.
How our scores are derived
Epic Beach Days computes its comfort scores, grades and recommendations from the data above. Those scores are ours — they are not provided, reviewed or endorsed by any data provider.
We adapt the source data to produce them. We convert wave height from metres to feet, and we combine hourly values over the beach day — 9am to 6pm for temperature, wind, UV and water temperature, and 9am to local sundown for rain — into a single daily reading per beach. So the numbers you see are derived and transformed, not the raw provider values.