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Swellread

Arugam Bay, Sri Lanka · Asia/Colombo

Arugam Bay

Pointing right at the open Indian Ocean. South-west monsoon is the season. No tide station in range, so the app says so instead of guessing at the reef.

Part of this page is live and part is not.

See the source list at the bottom for exactly which feed answered.

07:00 local · 2026-10-05

33% — the read for this hour

Marginal33%

Swell

0.72 m

Period

9 s

Swell from

149°

Wind

0.9 m/s

Wind from

306°

Air

28°C

Marginal33%

Marginal — one good hour at most. At Arugam Bay on this hour the read is 33%. What earns it: wind quality at 0.9 m/s straight offshore. What costs it: direction match at 57° off the 92° peel. Not scored, because no real data exists: Peel speed, Tide window.

No hour today clears the "worth the drive" bar at Arugam Bay.

Tide window for a beachbreak: 0.8–2.2 m of water over the take-off; below 0.30 m it works across the tide matters and the reef is exposed.

Arugam Bay · 24 hours, local timemixed data
00:0003:0006:0009:0012:0015:0018:0021:00
score tide (dashed, MLLW) swell height nowno tide station in range

Dashed line is the tide above MLLW, solid line is the swell height. Column height is the engine score for that hour. Faded columns are gated. The hour you select is in the URL, so this page is shareable as-is.

Tide station

No tide station in range, so no tide value is shown anywhere in this app.

Signature interaction

Drag the tide and watch the reef change its mind

The cross-section is drawn from the break's own reef slope. Every change re-runs the shared engine on the server and returns a fresh seal — this control cannot work without the API.

Seabed cross-section · Arugam BayBeachbreak — sand shifting under the take-off
take-off0m3m6m9m12m15moffshoreinshore · tanβ 0.04
0.91 m

The dashed arrow is the peel, at c = √(g·depth). More water over the take-off means a faster peel, which is why the same swell behaves differently at low and mid tide.

Re-solved by swellread-engine/2026.10.1

Marginal 33%seal ef0f125697ec…
Water over take-off
exposed
Break height
—
Peel speed
—
Wave power
2.8 kW/m

Marginal — one good hour at most. At Arugam Bay on this hour the read is 33%. What earns it: wind quality at 0.9 m/s straight offshore. What costs it: direction match at 57° off the 92° peel. Not scored, because no real data exists: Peel speed, Tide window.

Every factor, re-weighted for this tide

  • Swell power2.8 kW/m · 4.6%
  • Peel speedneeds a tide height
  • Wind quality0.9 m/s straight offshore · 13.6%
  • Tide windowno verified tide in range
  • Direction match57° off the 92° peel · 3.8%
  • Period cleanliness8.7 s · 11.2%

Show your working

Every factor, its weight, and the arithmetic behind it

Weights are renormalised over the factors that have real data behind them. A factor with no data is dropped and said so, never quietly scored at zero.

  • Swell power2.8 kW/m · 4.6%

    weight 0.355

  • Peel speedneeds a tide height

    weight 0.000 — dropped, not guessed

  • Wind quality0.9 m/s straight offshore · 13.6%

    weight 0.323

  • Tide windowno verified tide in range

    weight 0.000 — dropped, not guessed

  • Direction match57° off the 92° peel · 3.8%

    weight 0.194

  • Period cleanliness8.7 s · 11.2%

    weight 0.129

engine seal ef0f125697ec36c1fe5d958c42757c7b0cabb3480c25cdb6c9cf11107ec55ccd710d909d7e8f7a5f1daeb81915ebc5cf

  • Swell power

    P = 1/16 · rho · g · Hs² · Tp = 0.628 · 0.72² · 9 = 2.8 kW/m, against a 22 kW/m "serious day" reference.

  • Peel speednot scored

    Peel speed is shallow-water celerity, so without a verified tide height there is no depth to take the square root of. This factor is dropped rather than guessed.

  • Wind quality

    Wind is straight offshore at 0.9 m/s. Alignment = 1 − (1 + cos 157°)/2 = 0.96; speed envelope at 0.9 m/s = 0.44. Product 0.42.

  • Tide windownot scored

    This break has no NOAA CO-OPS tide station in range, so the tide window cannot be scored. Weights are renormalised without it instead of substituting a guess.

  • Direction match

    Swell from 149°, this break peels cleanly from 92°. 57° of error: inside 12° is full marks, past 75° the swell wraps the headland and does not arrive.

  • Period cleanliness

    Tp = 8.7 s. Energy organises between 6 s and 9.5 s; beyond 14 s the swell stands up steeper than a shallow reef can hold, so the score is eased off by up to 35%.

Provenance

Every number above came from one of these

Snapshot generated 2026-10-04T20:29:16.147Z. Break orientation, reef slope and take-off depth come from this project's catalogue and are labelled as estimates, not survey data.

Arugam Bay, Arugam Bay · Swellread