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Swellread

Kerala, India · Asia/Kolkata

Kovalam

South-west facing Arabian Sea beach. Monsoon swell, and the same missing-tide caveat as everywhere else on this coast.

Part of this page is live and part is not.

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

00:00 local · 2026-10-05

35% — the read for this hour

Marginal35%

Swell

1.16 m

Period

9 s

Swell from

168°

Wind

1.5 m/s

Wind from

74°

Air

25°C

Marginal35%

Marginal — one good hour at most. At Kovalam on this hour the read is 35%. What earns it: period cleanliness at 9.4 s. What costs it: direction match at 80° off the 248° peel. Not scored, because no real data exists: Peel speed, Tide window.

2 hours worth driving for today: 20:00, 21:00.

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.

Kovalam · 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 · KovalamBeachbreak — sand shifting under the take-off
take-off0m3m6m9m12m15moffshoreinshore · tanβ 0.04
0.98 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 35%seal b96cc5ec09c0…
Water over take-off
exposed
Break height
—
Peel speed
—
Wave power
8.0 kW/m

Marginal — one good hour at most. At Kovalam on this hour the read is 35%. What earns it: period cleanliness at 9.4 s. What costs it: direction match at 80° off the 248° peel. Not scored, because no real data exists: Peel speed, Tide window.

Every factor, re-weighted for this tide

  • Swell power8.0 kW/m · 12.8%
  • Peel speedneeds a tide height
  • Wind quality1.5 m/s 94° off · 9.4%
  • Tide windowno verified tide in range
  • Direction match80° off the 248° peel · 0.0%
  • Period cleanliness9.4 s · 12.9%

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 power8.0 kW/m · 12.8%

    weight 0.355

  • Peel speedneeds a tide height

    weight 0.000 — dropped, not guessed

  • Wind quality1.5 m/s 94° off · 9.4%

    weight 0.323

  • Tide windowno verified tide in range

    weight 0.000 — dropped, not guessed

  • Direction match80° off the 248° peel · 0.0%

    weight 0.194

  • Period cleanliness9.4 s · 12.9%

    weight 0.129

engine seal b96cc5ec09c0b42b49b7b5cc6f5614a14169a861ca2efb4587c1130566eeae17325e4b30a0d9ba0623f63a6303896948

  • Swell power

    P = 1/16 · rho · g · Hs² · Tp = 0.628 · 1.16² · 9 = 8.0 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 94° off at 1.5 m/s. Alignment = 1 − (1 + cos 94°)/2 = 0.53; speed envelope at 1.5 m/s = 0.55. Product 0.29.

  • 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 168°, this break peels cleanly from 248°. 80° of error: inside 12° is full marks, past 75° the swell wraps the headland and does not arrive.

  • Period cleanliness

    Tp = 9.4 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 2026-10-04T20:27:46.423Z. Break orientation, reef slope and take-off depth come from this project's catalogue and are labelled as estimates, not survey data.

Kovalam, Kerala · Swellread