What's New

Ever left your house thinking the wind’s going to be offshore and the waves glassy, but you turn up and it’s blown out? Yeah, us too.

Wind strength and direction often makes the difference between a fun session and a wasted trip to the beach. Our Live Wind feature—available to Surfline Premium members—helps you make the decision to surf with the confidence it won’t be victory at sea.

Over the last few years, we’ve installed weather stations near surf spots all over the world that send wind observations straight from the beach to Surfline. Live Wind gives you accurate, real-time wind data from as close to the surf as possible, allowing you to easily assess conditions leading up to your surf.

To date, we have over 500 spots with Live Wind around the world. Almost half of those are Surfline owned-and-operated stations, which means this wind data is exclusively available on Surfline.

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Understanding Live Wind

If a location has Live Wind, on the spot page you can click on the Live Wind label to view even more information:

• See the distance between the weather station and the surf spot at the top of the page, just underneath the Live Wind label. Our team has gone above and beyond to make sure the wind stations are precisely located to correspond with the spot you’re checking, getting as close as possible, and thus, as valid as possible.  
• Explore map and graph visuals to see how the direction of the wind impacts the surf and how it changes throughout the day.
• Compare observed wind to forecasted wind.

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Live Wind means better forecasts too.

Historically, our wind data came from forecast models, and just like waves and weather, wind cannot always be predicted with 100% accuracy. Wind is especially challenging to forecast for specific surf spots because of local geography such as mountains or valleys.

Getting more precise wind data leading up to your surf is not the only benefit of this feature. Live Wind observations help us fine tune the surf forecast for the rest of the day as well.

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What’s next for Live Wind?

We’re continuing to add weather stations around the globe, with more than 100 stations added since first implementing Live Wind (adding up to more than 300 total). If Live Wind hasn’t made it to your local spots yet, feel free to let us know at [email protected], and we’ll do our best to make it happen.

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