Live data tools for Hawaiʻi — beaches, surf, volcanoes, visitor flows, stargazing, whales, observatories, sunset, hiking, golf and more. Built for hotelhawaii.org from official US government and Hawaiʻi state data sources. All tools are free, ad-free, and update automatically.
Live conditions tools
- Hawaiʻi Beach Dashboard — 7-day swim conditions for sixteen beaches, with daily tide times, water temperature, wind, UV index. Filter by island.
- Hawaiʻi Surf Conditions — live wave + wind for fourteen named breaks across all four islands. Skill-level filtered.
- Hawaiʻi Sunset Forecast — best sunset spot per island for tonight + the next 7 nights, with sunset times.
- Hawaiʻi Stargazing Forecast — tonight + next 7 nights scored across the eight best dark-sky sites in Hawaiʻi (Mauna Kea, Haleakalā, Volcanoes NP and more).
- Kona Manta Ray Conditions — night-dive scoring for the famous Kona manta ray sites, with moon-phase weighting.
- Hawaiʻi Volcano Watch — live alert levels for the five Hawaiian volcanoes monitored by USGS HVO, plus recent earthquakes.
- Box Jellyfish Calendar — predicted influx days for south-shore Oʻahu beaches. Hawaiian box jellies arrive 8–10 days after every full moon; this tool tells you whether today is safe to swim.
- Portuguese Man-o-War Forecast — wind-conducive index for the next 7 days at twelve beaches across all four islands. Trade winds push them onto windward shores; Kona winds onto south shores.
- Sunrise Hike Timing — automated wake-up math for Haleakalā, Lanikai Pillbox, Diamond Head, Koko Head and Makapuʻu. Pick where you’re staying and when, and we tell you what time to set the alarm.
- How Hawaiʻi Was Formed — The Hotspot — interactive explainer of the mantle plume, the Pacific Plate moving NW at 7 cm/year, the 81-million-year Hawaiian–Emperor seamount chain, and Lōʻihi (the next Hawaiian island, already growing 975 m below the surface).
- Plantation Legacy Map — animated 1835–2016 timeline of every major Hawaiʻi sugar mill opening and closing. Watch the industry rise from one mill at Kōloa to over 50 in 1933, then collapse to zero with HC&S Maui in December 2016.
Activity guides + maps
- Oʻahu Hiking Trails — top 20 hikes mapped with route polylines, difficulty filter, and a full guide page per trail (article, route map, 7-day forecast specific to that trail).
- Hawaiʻi Golf Courses — every major course mapped with designer, year built, layout, tournaments, and a 7-day weather forecast at each location.
- Hawaiʻi Whale Watch — animated humpback migration from Alaska to Hawaiian waters, plus live recent sightings from iNaturalist.
Hawaii in motion + history
- Hawaiʻi Visitor Calendar — animated map showing how visitor presence on each island ebbs and flows across a typical year.
- Pearl Harbor — Minute by Minute — animated minute-by-minute reconstruction of the December 7, 1941 attack.
Reference + culture
- Mauna Kea Observatories — the 13 telescopes on the summit, filterable by wavelength regime.
- Hawaiian Moon Calendar — Mahina — 30 named nights per cycle with traditional fishing and planting wisdom from kūpuna (elders).
Companion guides
- When to visit Hawaiʻi — month-by-month — the honest, data-backed answer to which month suits which kind of trip.
- Hawaiʻi beaches: the island-by-island swim guide — which side of which island works in which season; how to read conditions; the named beaches that matter.
- Mauna Kea: stargazing on Hawaiʻi’s sacred summit — the complete guide to observatories and stargazing on the Big Island.
Built using only free, public data sources: Hawaiʻi Tourism Authority, US Geological Survey, NOAA, Open-Meteo, OpenStreetMap, iNaturalist, NPS Pearl Harbor National Memorial. None of these tools require sign-up, sell your data, or run paid trackers — they exist because the underlying data is free and Hawaiʻi deserves better tools than the booking-comparison sites provide.