How the score is built
Two rankings. Best waves, the default, answers "which are the great waves": up to 60 points for a break's standing among surfers (a Championship Tour, Big Wave Tour or Olympic venue scores 60, a break with a world-class reputation 35, a second peak of the same wave half that) and up to 40 for what the data below says the wave does on its good days. Most reliable answers "where is a random day most likely to be good", and uses the data alone, with one correction: where many spots share the same half-degree wave cell, each extra one pays a small penalty, so a single wave-model cell cannot fill the top of the list. Switch between them in the Sort menu.
Every spot is matched to the ERA5 ocean reanalysis cell that covers it and read across five full years of hourly data, 2018 to 2022: wave height, peak period and wave direction. Wind comes from ERA5 read for the local morning window, sea temperature from the last twelve months of ERA5 sea surface temperature, and the shape of the coast from the full resolution GSHHG shoreline, so we know which way each spot faces and which swells can actually reach it.
Wave quality 35%
How good the wave is when it breaks. Long-period swell, how much deep water there is to deliver it, whether a canyon or a reef pass focuses energy onto the spot, and how abruptly the bottom rises, which decides whether the wave throws or crumbles.
Best days 22%
What it does when a real swell lands: the size it reaches on its top tenth of days and the energy behind it. A spot that is 1.2 m most days and 4 m when it fires beats one that is 1.8 m forever.
Clean days 18%
Groundswell days that also had light or offshore wind in the morning.
Consistency 10%
Share of days with a workable wave, corrected for exposure.
Season spread 4%
How many months clear the consistency bar.
Water and access 10%
Sea temperature as a comfort measure, and how far the nearest airport and town are.
What changed, and why
The first version of this score asked only how often a place gives you a rideable, clean, warm wave. That put Sapinus first and Pipeline 1,545th, because nothing in it described the wave itself: the size was a median, so a spot that is small every day beat one that is huge when it fires; the sea floor was invisible, so a world-class reef and the beach beside it scored alike; and sea temperature carried enough weight to quietly turn the whole thing into a warm-water list.
This version adds the sea floor from ETOPO 2022 at fifteen arc-seconds, reads the swell at its ninetieth percentile instead of its median, and cuts the weight on water temperature. The weights were not chosen by taste: they were fitted against seventy breaks that any surfer, magazine or contest calendar would call world class, and the fit is checked by how high the ranking puts them. It moved their median position from the top 22% of the list to the top 11%, and Jeffreys Bay from 3,987th to 717th.
Why reputation counts in the default list: nothing in a global wave model can see a reef ledge or a sand point, so on data alone Pipeline sat in the 800s. The surfers who have ridden these waves for fifty years are the best measurement of that. Most reliable keeps the data-only view for anyone who wants it, and covers all 5,591 breaks (5,756 named peaks) so it still says something about the spots nobody has heard of.
Limits worth knowing: the wave grid is half a degree, so spots within about fifty kilometres share the same offshore swell and are separated by their exposure, their orientation, their wind and now their sea floor. The bathymetry is fifteen arc-seconds, roughly 460 metres, which resolves the shelf and the canyons but not the sandbar you actually surf, so it tells you how the energy arrives rather than exactly how the lip throws. Nothing here knows about crowds, localism, rips, rocks or access rules. And tides are not in the model at all, which matters most at the spots that only work on one of them.
