Warm Up on Tap; Maybe Some Waves

The NWS was unequivocal this morning...temps warming into the 70's and 80's at least through Sunday. There is a southern hemi storm pushing head to OH waves into CentroAm and some of Baja but once again shadowing in the SPAC will prevent even SoCal from experiencing anything significant from the current south swell way down there. Perhaps the last storm of the season is working it's way towards Cali from the NPAC wave womb, with low energy periods in the 12 to 14 second range, but a genuine storm driven swell none the less. I'm not expecting much in terms of quality or quantity, especially since it may make landfall during the weekend, but hey, there's always dawn patrol. At the very least I'll be out for a paddle in the sumptuous and scrumptious sunshine!

Thanks to Adam Wright's outstanding surf forecasting website I've picked up a couple new forecasting tools to play with. One is a very cool interactive data interface model (sounds scary huh...think, really cool colored animations) provided by NOAA Wave Watch III. Click here to play with it. The animation image at right is a picture of the nowcast (that means what's happening as we speak) swell period headed north. Adam predicted another similar south last week for CentroAm and Baja. To take a look at the results of that forecast click here. (BTW, if you're not tuned into Adam's NorCal and SoCal and Baja forecasts...you REALLY missed it!)

The second little trick I picked up is being able to translate the CDIP buoy data back into the NOAA/NDBC format (which I'm used to and like). Click here for the Harvest Buoy data, which is a great resource for picking up south swells that are headed north to us (none at this time unfortunately). You'll have to find the rest of the buoys for your area yourselves (Hint: access from the SIO website buoy pages...ATTENTION the last was for Geek Alert purposes only!