FORECAST WAVES

Ocean and Great Lakes wave forecasts, by basin — for people who go out on the water.

SWH Hs PERIOD · DIR

EXITS OCEAN EXPLORER GREAT LAKES MODELS ABOUT

Live Five global models — ECMWF Wave, AIFS Waves, GFS-Wave, GDWPS and the Met Office's Global Wave — across seven ocean basins, twenty seas and forty-five coastal approaches, plus all five Great Lakes from Environment Canada's RDWPS.

Ocean basins

EVERY VIEW IS A BASIN, NOT A COUNTRY

A wave forecast belongs to the water it's over, not the coastline nearest it — so unlike a land-based forecast site, Forecast Waves navigates water all the way down: the World Ocean, seven basins, the twenty seas inside them and forty-five coastal approaches under those. The model is a control inside the page rather than a route, so switching between ECMWF, AIFS, GFS-Wave and GDWPS keeps your place, your field and your lead time — which is the only way a comparison between them means anything.

LIVEBASIN

North Atlantic

The Gulf Stream storm track, the Grand Banks and the Western Approaches — the busiest shipping and fishing water on the network. Eight seas inside it, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Baltic.

LIVEBASIN

North Pacific

The largest fetch on Earth. The Gulf of Alaska, the Bering Sea and the long-period swell that reaches the West Coast days after the storm that made it has gone.

LIVEBASIN

Southern Ocean

The only latitude band with no land to stop it, and the biggest seas anywhere. A band rather than a basin — which is why this site draws it on a globe and not on Mercator.

LIVEFRESHWATER

Great Lakes

Fresh water, ocean physics, no swell to soften it — steep short-period seas at about one kilometre. Their own model and their own page, not a corner of the Atlantic one.

LIVEBASIN

Indian Ocean

Monsoon-driven in the north — the southwest monsoon makes the Arabian Sea one of the windiest seas on the planet for months — and Southern Ocean swell along the whole southern rim.

LIVEGLOBAL

The World Ocean

Every basin at once, on one raster. The place to watch a groundswell leave the Southern Ocean and arrive somewhere else four days later.

The models

ONE INSTRUMENT, FIVE SOURCES

ECMWF Wave The coupled ocean-wave component of ECMWF's HRES — the same centre Forecast Euro draws, pointed at the sea state instead of the atmosphere above it. GLOBAL · COUPLED WITH HRES AIFS Waves ECMWF's machine-learning forecast, carried here the same way Forecast Euro carries it for the atmosphere: same colours, same instrument, so it's comparable rather than just plausible. GLOBAL · MACHINE-LEARNING GFS-Wave (WAVEWATCH III) NOAA's global wave model, coupled with GFS and run operationally by NCEP — the open-data baseline every U.S. marine forecast is built on. GLOBAL · NOAA / NCEP GDWPS Environment Canada's global wave model — a fourth independent forecast of the same sea state, from a centre whose ocean-wave products are consistently excellent. GLOBAL · ECCC / MSC RDWPS — Great Lakes Environment Canada's regional model, run separately for each lake at about 1 km on its own bathymetry — nearshore resolution a global model can't give a freshwater basin. REGIONAL · ECCC / MSC

What the explorer does

THE SAME INSTRUMENT AS THE REST OF THE NETWORK

The sea, decomposed

Not just significant wave height. The wind sea being driven right now, the swell trains crossing it with their own height, period and direction, and — on ECMWF and AIFS — the sea state split into six period bands from 10 to 30 seconds, so you can watch one groundswell arrive band by band.

Swell and wind, as flow

Animated streamlines and arrows over any field, drawn along the direction the energy is travelling. Two sources where the model publishes both: the swell, and the 10 m wind putting it there. Where they disagree is a crossed sea.

Read the pixel

The published rasters are palettised, so the pointer inverts a colour straight back to a value — no second data fetch, and the readout can never disagree with the picture. In metres or feet.

1,129 colour tables

Repaint any field in any table in the library, matched to its units or stretched to fit. It rewrites 42 bytes of palette per frame rather than re-rendering anything, and the legend and the probe follow.

Take the picture with you

PNG, MP4 and animated GIF straight off the live canvas, in six aspect ratios from 16:9 to 9:16 — so the export is framed for where it is going, not cropped from a wide screenshot afterwards.

Drawn on a globe

Mercator is not offered, and that is deliberate: across a North Pacific frame it distorts area fourteenfold, and the Southern Ocean is a latitude band that Mercator cannot show as a place at all.

Why this site exists

Built for the water, not the coast

Most wave guidance is a layer bolted onto a land-forecast site. This one starts from the basin and the sea state — significant wave height, period and direction — and treats the shoreline as one edge of the map, not the subject of it.

Model vs. model, in one instrument

ECMWF, AIFS, NOAA's WAVEWATCH III, Environment Canada's GDWPS and the Met Office's Global Wave model are drawn in the same colours behind the same navigator and probe, so where they agree — and where they don't — is the thing you can actually see, not something you have to remember across five different sites.

Free, fast, no account

No tracking, no cookie banner, no login. Pages are static files and the basemap is self-hosted, the same practice as the rest of the network.

Part of the Forecast Network

Forecast Eagle covers North America from NOAA sources, Forecast Euro draws the ECMWF model worldwide, and Forecast Canada covers Canada from MSC. Forecast Waves is the same shared viewer, the same honest-rendering rules, pointed at the sea state instead of the land.