What makes it kiteable

Strength, gustiness and angle to shore, multiplied together. Strength is a curve peaking in the low twenties, so 35 knots scores worse than 22 rather than better — a ranking by knots alone is a worse Windguru. Gustiness is the gust divided by the mean: above about 1.4 the wind is holey and hard work whatever the average says.

Angle is measured against each spot’s shore bearing, and it’s the only term allowed to zero a spot outright. Straight offshore scores nothing even in perfect strength, because being blown out to sea is the failure mode that actually matters. Anything scoring zero is called not kiteable and dropped from the ranking rather than sorted quietly to the bottom of it.

Spots in the dark are excluded rather than deranked. Shore bearings are eyeballed from satellite imagery, which makes them the highest-leverage and least rigorous numbers in the whole thing.

Model wind, not measured wind

Readings come from global forecast models at roughly 1–11 km resolution, so they miss the thermal effects that make places like Tarifa and Hood River work. This page will sometimes be confidently wrong about a specific beach. Check a real forecast before you drive anywhere, and never rig on an offshore day because a website said the number was good.

Weather data by Open-Meteo, used under CC BY 4.0. One request, no key, no server, cached for fifteen minutes.