SAN DIEGO, RIGHT NOW
Gloom, surf and tide.
Marine layer
—cloud
AM avgCoast cloud cover, 6–11am, from the National Weather Service.
Full report, by band and by daySurf
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Live buoy height, period and direction off the San Diego coast.
Which breaks this swell reachesTide today
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Today's highs and lows from NOAA Tides & Currents.
How the tide reads at each breakTidepools today
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The daytime low tide, and whether it drops far enough to walk the reef.
Half a foot is roughly where San Diego reef starts to come out of the water. Lower is better, and negative is the good stuff.
In season right now
Nothing with a defined season window is running today.
A season window is not a guarantee. “Reliable” means it runs to a schedule; “likely” means most years; “unpredictable” means exactly that, whatever else you have read.
WHY THESE THREE, TOGETHER
Same coastline. Three unrelated numbers.
The marine layer is cloud cover. It is driven by ocean-cooled air sitting over the coast overnight, and it has no relationship to wave energy — a gray morning can have excellent surf, and a clear one can be flat. People plan around them together anyway, because both decide whether a morning at the beach is worth it.
Tide adds the third axis, and it is the one that changes the other two: a low tide can expose a reef that only works at that stage, and the same swell reads completely differently over a sandbar at high tide versus low. None of these three numbers predicts the others. That is exactly why they are worth reading side by side rather than assuming one tells you about the rest.