Raw Ocean Data, Made Surfable
PierMonkey takes the public data the pros use — NOAA buoys, wave models, tide stations, hurricane advisories — and turns it into one living map anyone can read. We've been at it since 2001.
Our 25th year of surf forecasting — read our storyWhy PierMonkey exists
The best ocean data in the world is public. NOAA operates hundreds of buoys, runs a global wave model four times a day, predicts every tide, and tracks every storm — but the raw feeds are scattered across a dozen government sites in formats only a scientist could love.
PierMonkey stitches it together: live buoy readings beside 16-day forecasts, storms beside the swell they generate, tides beside surf ratings — one map, one timeline, no paywall on the fundamentals.
And this isn't a new idea for us — we've been turning NOAA buoy data into surf calls since the dial-up era. The whole story is below.
A quarter-century of watching the water
PierMonkey isn't a startup wearing a surf brand — we were reading NOAA buoys for surfers back when the readings arrived over dial-up. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine preserves 146 snapshots of the piermonkey.com homepage going back to 2004, more than 4,500 archived pages from the original site, and a sister-site record reaching back to October 2001. The screenshots below are those actual archived pages — the real layouts, era by era.
- 2001
It starts before the archive can see
The oldest surviving trace of the PierMonkey network is not piermonkey.com at all — it's missmonkey.com, our sister site for women surfers, first archived by the Internet Archive in October 2001. That earliest capture is just a placeholder reading ":: little miss monkey ::" — the network's first timestamped footprint on the web. Within a few years it was running the full buoy-and-forecast toolset in a purple-and-pink wrapper, with a "Monkey Talk" feed following the women's pro tour.
The Archive's coverage of small sites was thin in the early 2000s — it only kept what its crawlers happened to find — so the record starts in 2001. The idea is older still.
missmonkey.com · archived 2004
missmonkey.com as archived December 1, 2004 — the domain’s archive trail begins in October 2001. - 2004
Already a national buoy network
The earliest fully readable snapshot of piermonkey.com, from October 2004, doesn't show a scrappy single-town surf page. It shows a national forecasting operation: eight U.S. regions, Alaska to Hawaii, with named NOAA buoys selectable in every one — roughly 62 individual stations survive in the archived pages, close to the full run of continental-U.S.-and-Hawaii buoys of the day.
Our signature "Wave Field" method — splitting a single swell into up to five separate wave trains, each with its own height, period and compass direction, instead of reporting one blended number — is already fully live on that 2004 page. It didn't arrive later; it's there from the first moment the archive can show.
piermonkey.com · 2004
piermonkey.com as archived December 15, 2004 — reporter "phossil" watching a 20-foot Kauai buoy to call whether the Pipe Masters or the Eddie would run. - 2004–09
A local voice on a national engine
What most visitors saw was the warm layer on top: a homepage built around the three buoys closest to home — Canaveral 20mi, Canaveral 120mi, St. Augustine — with live readings, tides, and a running commentary feed where local reporters posted several times a day about the Ponce Inlet, Daytona and New Smyrna stretch: how cold the water was, whether it was blown out or glassy, which contest might run at Pipe.
Photo galleries with a year-by-year archive, a Travel section, and a growing reporter roster filled the front page out through the late 2000s.
piermonkey.com · 2004–09
piermonkey.com as archived May 14, 2008 — a blown-out 1-to-1.5-ft morning called by reporter "stoked1", with photo galleries back to 2004. - 2010–16
The utilitarian decade
For roughly six years the site barely changed on the surface — the same three-buoy homepage, the same Wave Field charts, the same seven-tab navigation: Surf Report, Buoy Reports, Forecasts, Satellites, Models, Photo's, Contact. It's the version a whole generation of regulars knew best: utilitarian, buoy-data-forward, built by and for people who wanted the numbers rather than a glossy interface.
piermonkey.com · 2010–16
piermonkey.com as archived August 23, 2011 — the "7 day Forecast Wave Fields" charts entering the frame at the bottom. - 2016–21
The studio detour
In late 2016 PierMonkey pivoted into a web-design and digital-marketing studio, folding surf reports and photography in as two of seven services. The forecasting heart of the site went quiet for a few years — but it stayed online, and it stayed ours.
piermonkey.com · 2016–21
piermonkey.com as archived August 12, 2017 — the studio-era homepage. - 2021
All-in on forecasting again
Through 2021 the site was rebuilt into a member-driven forecasting platform and dropped everything else: free accounts, dedicated wave and wind tools, surf-shop and event maps. The region menu grew past the original eight — adding the Caribbean Sea, France and the Yucatan Basin — while the live buoy grid stayed anchored where it had been since the ColdFusion days: the continental U.S. and Hawaii.
piermonkey.com · the buoy network
The network the relaunch was built on — the continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii and the surrounding waters — rendered on today’s map, buoys only. - Today
The same idea, two decades sharper
Today's PierMonkey is the modern expression of the 2004 blueprint: 430+ live NOAA buoys instead of 62 archived ones, a 16-day global wave model refreshed four times a day, tides, hurricane tracking from the NHC and JTWC, an animated wave-energy map, and 74 surf spots rated Flat to Epic. Under it all is the same wave-train thinking the Wave Field tool pioneered — now with more than twenty years of forecasting behind it.
piermonkey.com · Today
piermonkey.com on July 25, 2026 — live swell energy, wave-train arrows, three named tropical systems, and the 16-day timeline on one map.
Era screenshots are our own captures of piermonkey.com and missmonkey.com pages preserved by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine; some period images and graphics were not archived and appear as gaps in the originals.
Where the data comes from
| Source | What it provides | Refresh |
|---|---|---|
| NOAA NDBC | Live observations from 430+ active moored weather buoys | Hourly |
| NOAA GFS-Wave | 16-day global wave & swell model forecasts | 4× daily |
| NOAA CO-OPS | Harmonic tide predictions | Continuous |
| National Hurricane Center | Atlantic & East Pacific storms, tracks, formation outlooks | Every advisory |
| Joint Typhoon Warning Center | West Pacific, Indian Ocean & Southern Hemisphere storms | Every warning |
Free forever
The live map, wave-energy layers, storm tracking, and buoy network are open to everyone — no account needed. A free account adds the full 16-day per-spot forecasts and custom swell alerts. There is no paid tier and no credit card field anywhere on this site.
Have a look around — everything's live
The map and live conditions are open to everyone. A free account unlocks full 16-day forecasts and custom swell alerts.