One screen for the day you are actually on the island: how big the waves are on the west coast, whether the sea is swimmable, how much rain is coming, how warm the water is, how strong the sun is, what the air monitor in Phuket Town reads, and which islands are open this month.
Wednesday, September 16 · Measured September 16, 2026 at 23:15 Phuket time · refreshed every 3 hours
Source unreachable on the last run: air. Those figures are the previous ones.
Our own reading of wave height, not the lifeguards’ flag. Beaches raise flags by local judgement, and a red flag on the sand always wins over this page. Source: Open-Meteo (forecast API); Open-Meteo (marine API); Air4Thai — Pollution Control Department, station 43t, Phuket Town · All sources
| Day | Weather | Max / min | Rain | Chance | UV max | Wave max, west |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wed, September 16 | rain showers | 30.8 / 25.3 °C | 6.7 mm | 69 % | 9.0 | 1.10 m |
| Thu, September 17 | thunderstorm | 28.4 / 24.2 °C | 30.4 mm | 94 % | 8.5 | 1.52 m |
| Fri, September 18 | thunderstorm | 27.2 / 24.4 °C | 28.8 mm | 88 % | 2.4 | 1.62 m |
Modelled daily values for the same points as the summary; the first row is today. Open-Meteo (forecast API), Open-Meteo (marine API).
The west-coast reading is 1.10 m: swimmable for a confident swimmer, uncomfortable for children and anyone who does not know where the rip channels are. Stay between the flags, stay where you can stand, and do not swim at the ends of the bay where the water drains back out. The south point reads 1.14 m against 1.10 m in the west: the two coasts are the same today, so pick a beach for its shade and its lunch, not its water.
6.7 mm of rain is expected and the chance of rain is 69 % — Phuket showers are short and heavy, so a scooter is fine if you can wait twenty minutes under a roof when one arrives. Take the poncho the rental shop offers.
Closed today: Similan Islands, Maya Bay (Phi Phi Leh). At a 1.10 m maximum the open crossings are comfortable enough for a speedboat day.
The UV index reads 0.0 (low on the WHO scale). Sunset is at 18:26, sunrise was at 06:16, 12.2 hours of daylight — the tropics give almost the same day length all year, so an evening plan made today works next month too. PM2.5 at the Phuket Town monitor is 7.7 µg/m³, below the WHO's 15 µg/m³ 24-hour guideline. The air is clean today.
One US dollar bought 33.06 baht at the last European Central Bank fixing (2026-09-11). That rate moves in weeks, not in hours, which is why it is the only figure on this page that is not re-read every 3 hours — and why the price index measures accommodation and transport twice a month rather than daily.
| Measurement | West (Bang Tao / Layan) | South (Nai Harn / Rawai) |
|---|---|---|
| Sea state | Swell | Swell |
| Wave height now | 1.10 m | 1.14 m |
| Highest wave today | 1.10 m | 1.14 m |
| Wave period | 7.6 s | 7.4 s |
| Water temperature | 29.9 °C | 29.9 °C |
| Our reading | Care needed | — |
West point 7.99°N 98.28°E (Bang Tao / Layan), south point 7.78°N 98.31°E (Nai Harn / Rawai). The flag row is our own wave-height reading for the exposed west coast and is not published for the south. Open-Meteo (marine API).
| Place | Today | Season |
|---|---|---|
| Similan Islands | Closed | 15 October – 15 May |
| Maya Bay (Phi Phi Leh) | Closed | 1 August – 30 September |
Mu Ko Similan National Park closes for the south-west monsoon; nothing runs outside the park season. Maya Bay closes every year for reef recovery; Phi Phi day trips still run and skip the bay. Swimming inside the bay is not permitted at any time of year. Dates come from the site's own tour catalogue, so this table and the tour pages cannot disagree.
Everything above is a measurement with a time on it. The weather figures come from the Open-Meteo forecast API at a land point on the west of the island (7.89°N 98.3°E), which is the same grid the site's eleven-year climate normals are built on, so a reading here can be compared with the month's median without switching sources. The sea comes from the Open-Meteo marine model at two points: 7.99°N 98.28°E, off Bang Tao and Layan on the exposed west coast, and 7.78°N 98.31°E off the southern end of the island, behind the headland that shelters Nai Harn and Rawai. PM2.5 comes from Air4Thai station 43t at the Municipal Health Center in Talat Yai, Phuket Town — the Pollution Control Department's reference monitor for the province, and the only continuous PM2.5 instrument on the island whose hourly data is published.
A model is not a buoy. Wave height here is the significant wave height the marine model computes for a grid cell a few kilometres offshore, not the shore break you will actually stand in: a bay facing away from the swell will be flatter than the number, a headland or a reef pass rougher. The air-quality monitor sits in the middle of Phuket Town, ten to fifteen kilometres from the west-coast beaches, so it describes traffic-side air rather than beach air. The temperature is a two-metre air temperature over land and will read lower than a car park in the sun and higher than a shaded terrace above the water. Those limits are the reason this page prints figures and their sources instead of a single word like “good”.
The site draws its line at 1.5 metres. That is not a number chosen for this page: the monthly climate dataset counts a “rough-sea day” whenever the modelled daily maximum wave height off the west coast reaches 1.5 m, and the best-time-to-visit page ranks the months of the year on how many of those days a median month has. Using the same threshold here means the day and the month cannot contradict each other — a day this page calls rough is exactly a day that would be counted as rough in the annual table. Below 0.8 m the west coast reads as flat; between 0.8 and 1.5 m there is a working swell.
The line on this page is our reading of a modelled wave height, and nothing more. Real flags on Phuket beaches are raised by the lifeguard service on the sand, which watches the water rather than a model and takes account of rip channels, tide and how many people are in the sea. Where the two disagree, the flag on the beach is right and this page is wrong. Phuket loses swimmers every monsoon season, almost always on the west coast, almost always past a red flag, and usually within a few hundred metres of a lifeguard tower — so the practical rule is simpler than any number: if a red flag is flying, the sea is closed, whatever a website says.
Today falls inside the south-west monsoon, May to October, when the swell arrives on the west coast and the rain arrives everywhere. A season is a statement about a median month, and any single day inside it can behave like the other half of the year: December days with a metre of swell exist, and so do calm, blue August afternoons. That is the whole reason for a page like this one — the monthly page tells you when to book a flight, this one tells you what to do after breakfast.
The three-day forecast above is the modelled outlook for the same points, and its usefulness falls off with distance: tomorrow is close to reliable for rain totals and wave height, the third day is a direction rather than a promise. Rain in Phuket is convective — an hour of very heavy rain and then sun, rather than a grey day — so a day carrying twenty millimetres is not a day indoors, it is a day with a plan that can pause. The seasonal statuses (Similan Islands and Maya Bay (Phi Phi Leh)) come from the tour catalogue that prices the island's day trips, so an opening date shown here is the same date the tour pages use.
It will not price anything. The Phuket Travel Price Index measures hotels, villas, transfers, tours, rentals and daily budgets on the 1st and the 15th of each month, at a fixed booking horizon, and publishes medians with sample sizes; a hotel median does not change because it rained, and pretending otherwise would make the index worse rather than the page better. It will not invent a figure either: when a source is unreachable the block keeps the last measurement and is marked as such, and a value that has never been read is an em dash. And it will not turn readings into adjectives — the whole page can be checked against its own sources, which are named in the text and listed with their licences on the sources page.
Weather, sea and air are re-read every 3 hours by a scheduled script and written straight into the file this page is built from — no forecasts of our own, no rounding into adjectives. Each block carries the time of its own measurement, and when a source is unreachable the previous figures stay with a note instead of being replaced by an estimate.
Page data written September 16, 2026 at 23:23 Phuket time · No prices on this page: the index measures them on the 1st and the 15th, not twice a day.
Care needed on the west coast: the modelled wave height off Bang Tao is 1.10 m, between the 0.8 m and 1.5 m lines. This is our reading of a modelled wave height, not the lifeguards' flag — the flag on the sand always wins.
At the last reading (September 16, 2026 at 23:15 Phuket time) precipitation was 0.2 mm; 6.7 mm is expected across the whole day, with a 69 % chance of rain. Phuket rain is convective: short, very heavy, and usually followed by sun rather than a grey afternoon.
The modelled sea-surface temperature off the west coast is 29.9 °C and 29.9 °C off the south of the island. The Andaman around Phuket stays between roughly 28 and 31 °C all year, so water temperature is never the reason to pick one month over another — wave height and rain are.
PM2.5 at the Air4Thai station in Phuket Town read 7.7 µg/m³ at the last hour on file — below the WHO's 15 µg/m³ 24-hour guideline. Phuket's bad air weeks come from mainland burning season, not from the island itself.
Every 3 hours. A scheduled script re-reads the weather, marine and air-quality sources and writes them into the file this page is built from; the newest measurement on file was taken September 16, 2026 at 23:15 Phuket time. Each block carries its own timestamp, and when a source is unreachable the previous figures stay with a note instead of being replaced by a guess. Prices are not on this page — the index measures those on the 1st and the 15th of each month.
Best time to visit, month by month ·Every beach on the island ·Day tours and what they cost
Source: Open-Meteo (forecast API); Open-Meteo (marine API); Air4Thai — Pollution Control Department, station 43t, Phuket Town; ECB reference rates via Frankfurter. CC BY 4.0 (Open-Meteo); Air4Thai reproduced with attribution. Compiled by phukettravels.com · All sources