About Tidewindow

A few times a month, a very low tide lines up with daylight, and the coast briefly turns into somewhere new — reefs you can walk on, sandbars that become causeways, pools full of anemones and nudibranchs. Most people find out about those hours afterward, from someone else's photos.

Tidewindow exists to answer one question ahead of time: “is this weekend any good — and if not, which morning is?” We compute the answer from NOAA CO-OPS tide predictionsintersected with the sun's actual position, score every window 0–100, and publish the math on the methodology page. When a week is a washout, we say so.

An honest word about how this site is made

Tidewindow is an automated publication. A data pipeline refreshes every number daily from NOAA, NWS, and iNaturalist. The writing is produced by an AI system under strict editorial rules: tide numbers may only come from the computed dataset, factual claims about places and access must be checked against a source fetched at publish time, and safety guidance is only quoted verbatim from park services. No fake authors, no invented expertise — just arithmetic, sources, and a genuine fondness for low tide.

Something wrong? Report it and it gets fixed in the next daily run. The window data is also downloadable per station and licensed CC BY 4.0 — cite as “Tidewindow, computed from NOAA CO-OPS predictions.”