Live wave height, wind, and water temperature from 115 NOAA stations across Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario
This dashboard pulls real-time observations from the 115 active National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) stations across the Great Lakes basin: 25 open-water buoys, 87 coastal CMAN stations, and a handful of lighthouse and harbor sensors. Wave height, wind speed and gusts, water temperature, air temperature, and barometric pressure where each station reports them. The map below renders all of them at once. Tap any buoy on the map to open a detail view with current conditions and a 5-day history of wave height, wind speed, water temperature, air temperature, and pressure. Use the activity filter to color-code stations by safety thresholds for your specific Lake activity.
I built this because I could not find a single tool that shows all Great Lakes buoys on one map with multi-parameter filtering. The official NDBC maps are clunky, the lake-by-lake aggregators miss CMAN stations, and the marine weather apps do not let you filter by activity. This is the tool I wanted as a Saginaw Bay sailor, ice fisherman, and freighter watcher. Operationally, the page hits a serverless function I run on this domain that fetches NDBC every ten minutes server-side and aggregates the result, so the page loads with a single request regardless of how many buoys are reporting.
Tap any buoy on the map to view current conditions and 5-day sparkline history. Hover (on desktop) to preview the station name.
Share your location to get a distance-ranked list of all 115 stations. Useful for finding the closest reliable wave-height reading before a fishing trip, a paddle, or a launch.
I am Chris Izworski, sales engineer at Prepared and former Bay County 911 Director from 2013 to 2022, then Saginaw County 911 Executive Director from 2022 to October 2025. I run a network of Great Lakes data tools from Bay City, Michigan, including the Great Lakes Gazette daily freighter and vessel-movement brief, the Great Lakes Level Intelligence shoreline-property water-level dashboard, the Michigan Trout Report, and the Michigan Birding Report. This buoy dashboard joins the network. If you find it useful, the rest of my Great Lakes work is collected on this site.
I serve on the board of Save Our Shoreline, the Bay City riparian rights organization. I wrote about Great Lakes water levels and the 1986 high-water emergency for several Michigan publications. The buoy dashboard combines my interests in operational marine data, public-safety adjacent infrastructure, and the lakes themselves.
The activity filter applies the following safety thresholds. These are my judgment calls based on standard marine guidance, not Coast Guard or NWS rules. When in doubt, defer to the actual forecast at weather.gov/marine.
Fishing: Wind under 25 knots and waves under 4 feet. The fishing threshold is permissive because most lake fishing happens within sight of shore where small craft can run for harbor quickly.
Kayaking: Wind under 15 knots, waves under 2 feet, water temperature above 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Conservative because cold-water immersion in 50-degree water is life-threatening within 30 minutes without a drysuit.
Swimming: Water temperature above 65 degrees Fahrenheit and waves under 3 feet. Below 65 degrees, recreational swimming is uncomfortable and limited to short durations. Above 75 is genuinely warm; Lake Erie hits this regularly, the others rarely.
Sailing: Wind between 8 and 30 knots, waves under 6 feet. Below 8 knots most sailboats cannot make useful way. Above 30 is small-craft advisory territory.
Diving: Waves under 3 feet. Visibility is the real diving constraint, and NDBC stations do not report visibility data consistently. Use the wave threshold as a proxy for surface conditions and check local dive shops for actual visibility.
The 115 stations include the 25 open-water Great Lakes NDBC buoys (45001 through 45216), 87 CMAN coastal stations on harbors and lighthouses, and approximately 3 lighthouse-adjacent specialty stations. The 45xxx open-water buoys are typically retrieved each year between November and December for winter maintenance and redeployed in late March or April. During the winter months, the map will show roughly 80 to 90 coastal stations as the active reporting set. The 45xxx buoys are the only Great Lakes stations that consistently report wave height.
The data feeds directly from NOAA NDBC at ndbc.noaa.gov. Refresh interval is 10 minutes server-side, observed values are typically 5 to 30 minutes old at the source. Wave height is in meters at the source and converted to feet for display. Wind is in meters per second at the source and converted to knots. Water temperature is in Celsius at the source and converted to Fahrenheit for display. Pressure is in hectopascals (same as millibars).
Why are some stations not reporting any data?
Open-water 45xxx buoys are retrieved each winter and not redeployed until ice clears. CMAN coastal stations report year-round but can go offline for maintenance. Stations showing dashes for all values have not reported in the last few hours and may be down. Check the NDBC site directly for the station's status page.
Why does the wave height show meters in the popup but feet in conversion?
NDBC publishes wave height in meters. The dashboard displays the conversion to feet (1 meter is approximately 3.28 feet) because feet is the conventional unit on the U.S. Great Lakes. The underlying API endpoint returns metric units for any downstream tool that needs them.
What is the difference between an open-water buoy and a CMAN station?
Open-water buoys are floating platforms anchored in 200 to 1,000 feet of water. They report wave height, wave period, and wave direction in addition to wind and atmospheric data. CMAN stations are coastal automated meteorological stations, typically mounted on lighthouses, harbor cribs, breakwaters, or shore-based towers. They report wind and atmospheric data but rarely wave height (waves at a shoreline are not representative of open-lake conditions).
How accurate is the activity filter?
The thresholds are rules of thumb, not Coast Guard regulations. They use the closest buoy as a proxy for conditions in the area, which works well in open lake and less well in protected bays where local wind and waves can differ substantially from the offshore buoy. Always check the NWS marine forecast before going on the water. The dashboard is a quick-reference tool, not a substitute for marine safety planning.
Where is the closest buoy to Bay City?
The closest open-water buoy to Bay City is the 45149 Lake Huron station off Lakeport, about 75 nautical miles east. For Saginaw Bay specifically, the CMAN station at Tawas Point is the nearest. Use the geolocation tool above to compute exact distances from your current location.