The National Weather service, in cooperation with NOAA, has a site called Interactive Marine Observations. It provides marine weather information from many coastal areas of the US and other parts of the world. Marine weather information is gathered from several sources including offshore weather buoys, coastal weather reporting stations, and reports from commercial shipping vessels. Once you arrive at the Marine Observations site, you will see a page that looks similar to the one below.
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Click on a buoy or CMAN station to get the current conditions
In order to go to a specific set of reporting stations or buoys click on the above map for the area you want. When you click on the Florida section, you get a "zoomed version" with more details of the stations available as depicted in the map below.
If you are going to be arriving at the St. Lucie Inlet, for example, choose the closest station which is the LKWF1 (Lake Worth, FL) about 30 miles south. You get the results as depicted below:
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Current Weather
at Lake Worth, FL Station Id: LKWF1 Type of Platform: C-MAN Owned and maintained by: United States of America Instrument Payload:VEEP type Latitude 26° 36´ 42´´ N Longitude 080° 02´ 00´´ W [ Detailed Location Map ] [ Latest Marine Forecast ] Time of Observation: 11:00 AM EDT, Wed, Jul 1, 1998 ( 43 min. ago) |
Meteorological Data at 11:00 AM EDT |
Temperature: 86.5 ° F
Sea Level Pressure: 30.08 in
Pressure Tendency: 0.01 in
Wind and Sea State at 11:00 AM EDT |
Sustained Wind: WSW (250°) at 6 kt
Gust: 8 kt
Estimated Wind at 10 meters (32 feet): 6 kt
Estimated Wind at 20 meters (64 feet): 7 kt
Sea Surface Temperature: 82.8 ° F
Tide: 1.1 ft relative to Mean Lower Low Water (MLLW)
Continuous Wind Data at 11:00 AM EDT |
Recent Observations |
Data Older Than 24 Hours |
You receive all the information that you could possibly need for marine forecasting at this location. I have only included a small portion of the information available. Also, if you click on the link Latest Marine Forecast at the actual website, you get a page that looks like a teletype broadcast. This is the text version of what you would hear if you were to tune in to your VHF radio on a weather channel.
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