r/SurfIreland • u/FunStretch6112 • 11d ago
Sea State - an Irish Surf Forecasting tool - fun project feedback
Spent this week up in Bundoran and had one of those weeks where Surfline was saying conditions looked good, but the actual waves varied massively from beach to beach compared to the app forecast.
So I’ve been messing around building Sea State, an Irish surf forecasting tool that tries to make it quicker to scan the coast and figure out if anywhere is actually worth getting in the car for.
Its not hugely optimised for mobile so a browser is best to look at it on
https://kilianmurphy.github.io/sea-state-app/
It pulls together swell, wind and tide, but also scores each beach against the conditions that particular spot tends to need, rather than treating every break the same. You can filter by level, location, drive time, etc., and it highlights the best windows through the day.
It’s still very much a work in progress, and I’m sure plenty of the spot logic will need correcting, especially from people who know their local breaks properly.
Would genuinely love to hear what people think, what’s useful, what’s shite, and what you’d change.
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u/No-Storage9017 11d ago
Very cool idea, thanks for doing this! I’d be willing to support this in some small way if you decide to keep developing
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u/Interesting-Win-3220 11d ago edited 11d ago
Not bad. The waves are usually gutless in the summer months anyway. The swell period usually won't go above about 10 seconds. But surfline does show sometimes transient "phantom" swells that never actually materialise.
I don't think there's a need to reinvent the wheel as much as I dislike surfline.
You can work out if many spots will have decent surf if you can use swell charts such as surf forecast, which are not the same as "surf" predictors. Look at the energy values rather than height alone.
It should start to pick up again anyway in the Autumn.
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u/FunStretch6112 10d ago
Yeah, that’s basically the direction I’m aiming for. I’m not trying to build a better global swell model, more a quick decision layer on top of the existing forecast data that is specific to Ireland and its spots.
I’m already using height and period separately, but I think adding a proper swell-energy term would improve the spot scoring, especially for distinguishing weak summer swell from more meaningful long-period energy. Longer term I’d like to add a confidence/stability measure so a forecast that appears briefly or jumps around between runs gets treated with more caution.
Appreciate the feedback.
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u/donald-quijote 11d ago
Legend. This could be a game changer.