What has your experience with this website been like? is it right.. wrong, fairly accurate? cause it is saying were gonna have some kinda windswell next saturday, but surfline isnt forcasting it. I cant surf the swell during the week, so this is like super important for me.
http://magicseaweed.com/spot-forecas...amp=1295719200
and wow.. looks like swellinfo is forecasting it. coolOriginally Posted by cobtaco223
Magic seaweed has never been very accurate for me.
Magic Seaweed is a joke there wave hights are always off. Surfine is pretty lousy too unless you pay for it but even then they really dont give the eastcoast the attention it does to the westcoast and the rest of the world. Also I find both the site really not user friendly.
magicseaweed isn't all that accurate with wave heights I only use it to check winds
Although my personal research has indicated that the "wave history" and the record of swell data is generally accurate, all the locals back home agree that magicseaweed is not accurate...
It lists the following area, in order of annual swell averages... and they define a "swell" as anything ridable over 3 feet, with at least 7 second periods...
So, its says:
#1: Central Florida 36-38% of the year there is ridable windswell, but sometimes groundswell
#2: OBX: Says mostly windswell annually, at about 32-35% of the time.
#3: Jersey: about 28% of the time, jersey has swell
#4: Virginia Beach, 23-26% of the time it has swell (And this is the most argued area. VB locals swear they only get like 10 ridable days each year and its a mushball, however the data SHOWS otherwise, as far as magicseaweed goes...
#5: OC MD 21-24% of the time, OC MD has swell. (OC locals argue that they swells are hollower, faster and generally better than those of VB and Florida, so there are other variables that are not factored it... This is just off the 3ft+, 7sec+ math)
#6: New York/New England 20-22%
#7: Wilmington, NC 17-19%
down to the worst, which i think is recorded as Northern GA and South Carolina, clocking in at around %10....
So, there is the data... Some agree with it, some dissagree, but "supposedly" they accumulate this data based of averaeg of the past 10 years RECORDED swell activity on shore....
So, the forecasting tool SUCKS, but I dont know how the "REPORT" functions work... Because the "reports" actual report info is what is recorded to cross reference the data....
Anyway, been checkin that site for years, researching ever nook and cranny back east, but who knows if its accurate at all...
The 100% best RECORED data available online is from surfline's paid accounts. You can tap into LOLA and retrieve very accurate swell information from any date and time within 10 years or so... And LOLA is the best RECORDED data... They have real live humans ni most areas record the actual report info, so it is by far the most accurate almanac if you will, of surfing... especially no the west coast. Lola is within a few inches of the reported data, even when its huge and 15 feet out, it records it as exactly that...
I have no beef with surflines reporting... in thousands of sessions, ive been thrown off only a hand full of times, and usually it is because surfline underforecasted some larger NW swells...
Reports says 3-5 feet, you get there and its like 3ft overhead... That can happen, but it almost never over-shoots the data.
Last edited by zach619; Jan 16, 2011 at 10:53 PM.
I can't believe Magic Seaweed is using on-shore recorded swell activity. No such data base exists. I believe they are using buoy data, and that is the problem with magic seaweed. Off shore buoys dont represent surf condtions.
exactly the same thing for me
eh, never been impressed.
I never miss with swellinfo. Within 48 hours its spot on. Anything outside of that is a shot in the dark anyways, wherever you look.
Yeah, i wondered that as well. I had assumed they were using their own internal data that is saved into each date/locations variables. It is a very simple algorythm to file information like that into a database to be retreived with simple variable extraction... But I think you are right, that they are using buoy data. Its easier that way, but with such a large system recording so much data, I would assume the variables dont just get dumped and reloaded each day. When I ran a forecasting site, I had each date safe itself into 2 text files, to be scanned with PHP at a later date to look back on it.
But it would be a shame if all that data dumps itself away...
Hint hint... Micha... cough... =) It would take a bunch of server space, but maybe you can think of a way to have the data dumped into a SQL database or something... Nothing fancy... Just general regional data. Its worth looking into =) I think a lot of users would spend hours sifting through all that data.
But that why I like LOLA at surfline, cause it does that. It dumps every recorded variable into a very nice database system for retrieval. The initial setup may be a *****, but the system dumps its own data once you configure it correctly.
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