The cleanest beaches in Miami right now

Why we do not publish a fixed ranking

Lists of "the cleanest beaches in Miami" usually rank the same names every year. With sargassum that does not work. A beach that is spotless on Monday can have a brown band along the water on Wednesday, and be clear again by the weekend. What decides it is not the beach's reputation but what the sea brings that day.

So instead of a ranking written once, this article points you to the order the index gives right now. The card above and the "Clean right now" list on the side are not written by hand: they read the same live data as the rest of the site and show how old that data is.

How the order is made

Each beach gets a value from 0 to 100. Low means little or no sargassum; high means a lot. The value combines satellite images of the sea, the wind and the currents that push the seaweed toward or away from the coast, the tides, and the reports people send from the sand. We explain each part on How we measure.

The cleanest beaches are simply the ones with the lowest value at this moment. If the newest data for a beach is old, the site says so instead of pretending it is fresh.

Where to look in Miami

These are the beaches we follow in Miami-Dade. Open any of them to see today's level, the week ahead and the latest reports:

• South Pointe, at the southern tip of Miami Beach.
• South Beach and Mid-Beach.
• North Beach, Surfside and Haulover.
• Sunny Isles Beach and Bal Harbour.
• Crandon Park, Bill Baggs Cape Florida and Virginia Key.
• Matheson Hammock, on the bay side.

A useful habit

Check the level the morning you go, not the night before. If your first choice looks heavy, look at the neighbours: two beaches a few miles apart can be very different on the same day, because the shape of the coast and the direction of the wind matter as much as the amount of seaweed out at sea.

And when you get there, send a quick report. It takes a few seconds and it is the most direct way to keep the order honest for the next person on the way.