Case study · Geospatial · Mobile PWA

Freedive Map

A map that tells freedivers and spearos whether the ocean is good for diving today, one score, built from five live data sources.

What we did
Product design + full build
Year
2025
Type
Geospatial · Mobile PWA

The problem

Before a dive, you want to know one thing: is the water any good right now? But the answer is scattered. You'd open one site for the swell, another for wind, a weather app for the forecast, somewhere else for water temperature, and the Bureau of Meteorology for tides, then try to add it all up in your head while standing on the beach.

It's slow, it's a guess, and you still don't really know if the spot you're driving to will be calm or churned up.

🌊 Swell site💨 Wind app🌡️ Sea temp🌥️ Weather📈 BOM tides
70
ONE SCORE
Five tabs and a guess → one number.

One score, five sources

We boil the whole ocean down to a single dive score out of 100. Drop a pin anywhere on the coast and it reads the waves, currents, wind, water clarity and temperature, weighs them the way a diver actually would, and gives you a plain answer: good, okay, or stay home.

Tap the score and it opens up, so you can see exactly which condition is dragging it down.

0GOOD
↑ one number,
five data sources
Waves0.4 m
Currentslow
Wind4 kn
Visibility12 m
Temp23.1°
The dive score, broken into the five conditions that build it.

Reading the ocean

The whole thing lives on a map. Pins mark known dive sites, but you can tap anywhere on the coastline and pull live conditions for that exact spot, plus a 96-hour timeline so you can pick the best window this week. Recent fish and marine-life sightings show up too, pulled from citizen-science records.

Live iframe embed of Freedive Map at -33.8913, 151.2740, zoom 14.Open live app

Finding calm water

Here's the clever bit. Whether a spot is calm depends on how much open water the wind has to build waves across, called fetch. A headland to windward can shelter a bay completely. So for any point you tap, we fire rays out across the sea in every direction, measure how far each one travels before it hits land, and feed that into a classic wave-growth formula. The result: we can tell you a spot is sheltered before you drive an hour to find out it isn't.

LANDOPEN WATERyou
land = shelteredopen = waves
fig. 01 · wind-shelter modelfreedive-map
1We fire rays out in every direction to measure open water.
✓ calm enough
dive score 70
Wind-shelter model: rays measure open-water distance (fetch) in every direction; land-blocked rays mean calm water.

In plain terms: the app does the geometry a local who knows the spot does in their head, automatically, for the entire Australian coastline.

Under the hood

Five independent data feeds, stitched into one fast, offline-capable app you can install on your phone like a native one.

🌊Open-MeteoWaves, wind & weather forecasts
📈Bureau of MeteorologyTides · 600+ stations
🛰️CopernicusSatellite water clarity · 300 m resolution
🗺️GEBCOSeafloor depth model
5
live data sources in one score
600+
BoM tidal stations covered
96 hr
forecast timeline
PWA
installable, works offline

Outcome

Freedive Map turns a five-tab guessing game into a single glance. Pick a spot, read the score, check your window, go. It covers the whole Australian coast and runs on the phone in your pocket, no app store, no sign-up.

"The geometry a local does in their head, automated for an entire coastline."