Crystal Coast water temperature, month by month: five years of NOAA readings
Monthly average water temperature at the NOAA station in Beaufort, built from hourly readings for 2021 to 2025, with the coolest and warmest year for each month, plus daylight hours and tide range.
If you are choosing a month for a trip to the Crystal Coast, how warm the water is matters for swimming, surfing and fishing. This note turns NOAA’s published hourly readings into a month-by-month table, and says exactly what the table does and does not show.
Method
- Station. NOAA CO-OPS station 8656483, Beaufort, Duke Marine Lab, at 34.717 N, 76.671 W. We used it because it publishes water temperature, it is the closest published station to Atlantic Beach that we found, and it has a long record. It sits on the sheltered inlet side of Beaufort, not on the open-ocean beach, so water temperature at the surf line can differ from these figures.
- Data. Hourly water-temperature readings, in degrees Fahrenheit, for each calendar year from 2021 to 2025. The data were requested from NOAA’s public data service on 31 October 2026 with the product set to water temperature and the interval set to hourly, one request per year.
- Calculation. For each month, we took the mean of every hourly reading across all five years (about 3,600 values per month). We also took each year’s own monthly mean and report the coolest and the warmest of the five, so you can see how much one month varies from year to year.
- Missing data. Months have at least 95.5% of their hours with a reading. The weakest month for coverage is June at 95.5%; the December coverage is 97.2%.
- Script. A short Python script reads the five downloaded files and prints the table below. You can check it yourself by requesting the same data from NOAA and averaging the readings by month.
Monthly water temperature at Beaufort, 2021 to 2025
| Month | Mean, 2021-2025 | Coolest year’s mean | Warmest year’s mean |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | 51.2 °F | 46.0 °F | 54.5 °F |
| February | 52.7 °F | 49.8 °F | 57.2 °F |
| March | 58.8 °F | 57.6 °F | 60.0 °F |
| April | 66.2 °F | 64.9 °F | 68.0 °F |
| May | 72.8 °F | 70.7 °F | 74.5 °F |
| June | 79.7 °F | 76.8 °F | 80.7 °F |
| July | 83.9 °F | 83.2 °F | 84.6 °F |
| August | 83.2 °F | 81.3 °F | 85.0 °F |
| September | 79.0 °F | 76.7 °F | 80.8 °F |
| October | 70.8 °F | 69.2 °F | 74.1 °F |
| November | 62.2 °F | 60.5 °F | 64.5 °F |
| December | 54.2 °F | 51.9 °F | 57.2 °F |
What the table shows
- The warmest month in these records is July at 83.9 °F, closely followed by August at 83.2 °F. The coolest is January at 51.2 °F.
- The range of the means is 32.7 °F, from the January mean to the July mean.
- The month-to-month swing is largest in spring and autumn. March to April rises by 7.4 °F, and October to November falls by 8.6 °F.
- A single month can vary by several degrees between years. January’s yearly means range from 46.0 °F to 54.5 °F, a spread of 8.5 °F, so a table of averages is a guide and not a forecast.
What the table does not show
Five years is a short record, and it says nothing about the weather you will get on a given day. Readings at an inlet-side station are not readings at the open-ocean surf line. Water temperature is also not the only comfort factor: wind and air temperature matter too, and we have not included them here.
Daylight and tides at a glance
Daylight and tides also shape a beach day. The U.S. Naval Observatory publishes sunrise and sunset times, and for Atlantic Beach (34.70 N, 76.74 W) on the 15th of each month in 2026 they give:
| Date | Sunrise | Sunset | Daylight |
|---|---|---|---|
| 15 January | 07:14 | 17:19 | 10 h 05 min |
| 15 February | 06:52 | 17:50 | 10 h 58 min |
| 15 March | 07:17 | 19:15 | 11 h 58 min |
| 15 April | 06:35 | 19:39 | 13 h 04 min |
| 15 May | 06:04 | 20:03 | 13 h 59 min |
| 15 June | 05:53 | 20:22 | 14 h 29 min |
| 15 July | 06:05 | 20:20 | 14 h 15 min |
| 15 August | 06:28 | 19:55 | 13 h 27 min |
| 15 September | 06:50 | 19:14 | 12 h 24 min |
| 15 October | 07:13 | 18:32 | 11 h 19 min |
| 15 November | 06:41 | 17:02 | 10 h 21 min |
| 15 December | 07:07 | 16:58 | 9 h 51 min |
Clocks are on daylight time from 8 March to 1 November in 2026, which is why the March figures jump. Station 8656483 also publishes tidal datums, and gives a mean range of tide of 3.11 feet over the 1983 to 2001 tidal datum epoch (mean high water 5.09 ft and mean low water 1.99 ft above the station datum, a difference of 3.10 ft, with NOAA’s own figure being 3.11). As with the water temperature, this is a station figure, and the beach may differ: NOAA’s Atlantic Beach tide station (8656590), a few kilometres away, lists 3.65 feet for the same epoch (NOAA CO-OPS datums).
How to check this yourself
Ask NOAA’s data service for hourly water temperature at station 8656483 for a year, group the readings by month, and average each group. For daylight, enter the date and coordinates in the Naval Observatory’s rise and set service. A spreadsheet is enough for either.
Sources
Opened 31 October 2026.
- NOAA CO-OPS — Water temperature, station 8656483, 2021: hourly readings; the same request was repeated for 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.
- NOAA CO-OPS — Water temperature, station 8656483, 2025: the most recent year in the table.
- NOAA CO-OPS — Tidal datums, station 8656483: mean range of tide.
- NOAA CO-OPS — Tidal datums, station 8656590 Atlantic Beach: mean range of tide at the Atlantic Beach station.
- U.S. Naval Observatory — rise and set: sunrise and sunset, one request per date.
Sources
- NOAA CO-OPS — Water temperature, station 8656483 Beaufort, Duke Marine Lab (hourly, 2021) — accessed 2026-10-31
- NOAA CO-OPS — Water temperature, station 8656483 (hourly, 2022 to 2025, same request with other years) — accessed 2026-10-31
- NOAA CO-OPS — Tidal datums, station 8656483 — accessed 2026-10-31
- U.S. Naval Observatory — Astronomical Applications API (rise and set, one day) — accessed 2026-10-31