Where the data comes from

Waves, wind and weather

For every spot, hour by hour and seven days ahead: wave height, swell height, period and direction, wind speed, direction and gusts, sea temperature, sky and UV, refreshed twice a day.

What is SurfMap's own is the reading of each spot: how those inputs become a rating for your level, explained below.

Tides

High and low tide times and the tide curve are predicted for each spot from its own tidal constants, the same method behind printed tide tables, at the nearest ocean point.

Heights are relative to mean sea level. These are predictions, not official tide tables: for navigation, use the tables of your national hydrographic office.

The ratings

The rating is SurfMap's own method, computed for every hour of the week. It scores wave height and period, wind strength and direction relative to the coast, and the tide, and produces three ratings, one each for beginner, intermediate and advanced surfers, on a five-step scale: Bad, Poor, Fair, Good, Great.

On your phone, the sessions you rate refine it into a personal rating. Nothing is rated by hand and no spot is promoted.

The spot database

More than 5,000 surf spots with coordinates, region and country, maintained by hand. Each spot carries the name locals use, with the nickname travellers know as an alias; hundreds of spellings were checked and corrected in 2026.

Corrections come from surfers who write in. If your spot is missing or wrong, tell us.

Guides, photos and maps

The destination guides and spot pages are written by hand, not generated from the database. Photos come from Pexels photographers, credited at the bottom of each page. Guide maps are drawn on CARTO tiles from OpenStreetMap data, with town names from OpenStreetMap.

The level demo on the homepage draws a simplified coastline from Natural Earth with real spots from the app, over example conditions. It is an illustration, never a live forecast.

CreditMap data © OpenStreetMap contributors, © CARTO · Coastline: Natural Earth

OpenStreetMapCARTONatural EarthPexels

The charts on the tees

The nautical charts printed in the shop are drawn from survey data: coastline and shore features from OpenStreetMap, depth contours from GMRT and EMODnet sonar bathymetry, reefs from the Allen Coral Atlas. Where nobody has surveyed the seafloor near a spot, the depths are left off rather than guessed.

CreditCoastline and shore features © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL) · Bathymetry GMRT and EMODnet (CC BY 4.0) · Reefs Allen Coral Atlas (CC BY 4.0)

GMRTEMODnetAllen Coral Atlas

This website

There is no forecast on surf-map.com, by design: conditions only appear inside the app. The site uses privacy-friendly analytics (Umami, self-hosted, without cookies) and no advertising trackers.

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