NOAA NDBC Ocean Weather – Buoy data in HA for swimming conditions & notifications (no API key)

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I live by the ocean and wanted to know when the water was good for swimming and to get buoy data into Home Assistant so I could build notifications (e.g. “water’s comfortable,” “waves are up,” “wind’s too strong”). I couldn’t find an integration that pulled NOAA’s real buoy/coastal data, so I built one.

NOAA NDBC Ocean Weather brings NOAA NDBC buoy and coastal station data into Home Assistant. It uses the NDBC realtime2 text files—no API key required.

What you get

For each station you configure (by NDBC station ID), you get sensors for:

  • Water temperature and air temperature – great for a “swim comfort” sensor

  • Wind (direction, speed, gust)

  • Waves (height, period, direction)

  • Pressure, dew point

  • Last updated (observation time from the buoy, UTC)

Data updates about every 30 minutes. NDBC usually updates hourly, so the default interval is respectful of their servers.

Installation (HACS)

  1. HACS → Integrations → ⋮ → Custom repositories

  2. Add: https://github.com/cofabri-dev/noaa-ndbc-hacs-integration → Integration

  3. Search NOAA NDBC Ocean Weather → Download → Restart Home Assistant

  4. Settings → Devices & services → Add integration → NOAA NDBC Ocean Weather

  5. Enter your NDBC Station ID (e.g. 41002 for buoys, FPSN7 for C-MAN). Use the NDBC station list to find the one nearest your beach (there’s also a map on the NDBC site).

Swimming conditions & notifications

  • The repo includes an Ocean Swim Comfort template sensor (air + water temp → “Too cold” / “Brisk” / “Comfortable” / “Warm”). Drop it into configuration.yaml, point it at your buoy’s entity IDs, and reload Template. You can even take it a step further by adding your weather integration and comparing weather conditions to get a comprehensive swimming recommendation!

  • Use that sensor (or wave height, wind speed, etc.) in automations to send notifications when conditions hit your thresholds—e.g. notify when “Ocean Swim Comfort” is “Comfortable” or when wave height is above a certain value.

Requirements

  • Home Assistant 2023.x or newer

  • Internet access to ndbc.noaa.gov

GitHub – manual install, full sensor list, and Ocean Swim Comfort template.

1 Like
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This is excellent!

the icon for the integration does not show if installed from HACS.

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Can you get this in there too? Red Tide Current Status

There is also this: https://visitbeaches.org/

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Thank you for your work. Just as an FYI, there is https://github.com/jshufro/home_assistant_noaa_tides