[QUOTE=shark-hunter;231983 You can NOT rely on a buoy in RI for great accuracy if you find yourself suffering from the blasphemy of buoy befuddlement (i'm talking' the devices, not intermediates) use instead as your beacon SWELL DIRECTION. RI is sensitive to this issue…..
Bouys will not lie. With that being said the bouys are not what tells us if there's going to be waves. We have to take that information ourselves and come up with our own educated guess if there's waves or not. Like others said there are allot of variables to consider. My point is that no one is ever going to predict waves with 100% accuracy every time but if you use the bouys along with some other information like local knowledge you can be pretty damn accurate most of the time. The bouys are a great resource for us to use. There recording real time data, that won't fail you. I don't know much about RI, but I know your full of crap shark hunter. There is a reason why some swells hold up and why some die out. I'm not from there so I don't know but there is some variable, and it's the locals job to figure it out. There have been threads about keeping a surf log before, this is where that comes in handy. And again, having local knowledge is just as important as the bouys. So I'm not surprised you have trouble with the bouys considering the little time you spend in the water. But don't try and steer someone away from a great resource for us wave riders just because you have trouble with it. That's not right.
God you're lack of knowledge is so sparse it's almost hilarious. Yes the variable is distance that buoy is from shore. Ok, go on the nws graphical forecast next time there's a swell and look at wave height and notice if you see a difference between 50 miles past block island and the immediate near shore waters off Rhody. WAVES LOSE WAVE HEIGHT AS THE MOVE AWAY FROM THEIR SOURCE! So it's possible that the 3 feet at 8 seconds that is hitting station 44097 will not hit ANY SURF BREAK IN RI. It will die before I know EVERY SINGLE SURF SPOT IN RI. 8 seconds period swells do not refract into rocky reefs and increase in size like some long period stuff that we rarely get..... I know which spots are exposed to different swell directions ADMIN, can you please advise people that just because a wind wave height even with a proper direction is showing up 100 miles off the coast does not mean it's hitting ANY spot in ri. They can degrade. It depends how far away and the period of the swell. Some swells will make it to Station 44097, but will die off before they hit ri. Swells lose size as they move across ocean especially short period stuff so common sense would dictate that 100 miles off the coast is different that what's happening at the beach! Have fun with your rideable swell in the 10 miles inside area of the nj islands that are being built! Such smart people posting on this forum!
If you've been doing this for any length of time you know damn well the best and most consistent way to know what's going on other than driving right up to the break is a webcam/reports. PERIOD. I barely even check a buoy. It's limited in it's usefulness. It's too far offshore here. That station is meant for mariners. If you wanted to have a buoy for sure you put it a mile offshore. Not around 100
Your making my point (yet your calling me stupid). No one said that because the bouy says whatever at whatever second means there's going to be waves. Re read my post I said you have to take other variables into account. Like you just did. It sounds like your mad because you hadn't been in the water. You know the bouys 100 miles out, so you just take that into consideration. RI gets waves, there is a reason why sometimes it does and a reason why it dosn't. You are still using the information from the bouy.
So you just agreed with me and admitted I was right! LOL But you don't like me to so you try to deflect and make your side of the argument different than it was. THE ENTIRE ARGUMENT WAS THAT THE BUOY NEVER FAILS....IE NEVER....IE IT'S ALWAYS RIGHT. THAT'S THE ARGUMENT. HELLO!!!!!! THAT'S WHAT I TOOK ISSUE WITH. I have imbeciles telling me, who know nothing about ri, that I have to find the right buoy. Should I pull all the quotes?
If you look at a bouy 100 miles out and think that just because it says 4-6 feet there's going to be waves, that's on you not the bouy. That's the point here. If nothing is going on out there then there probably isn't much going on at the beach. If there are some waves 100 out then with some knowledge you can predict if it will degrade or hold up. The bouy just gives us information. Information won't fail you if you know how to use it. Now I think I made my point enough times I'm bowing out
It's as accurate as you are going to get. Every site, from surfline, magicseaweed and here all use the same general guidelines for forecasting. All the data is being pulled from Buoys, in some cases, multiple buoys. It is not an exact science, however the system on this site does up date itself quite often, so every hour or two, new buoys data pings in, then swellinfo populates the new data and spits out the new forecasts... There are a couple things to note though. In a place like where I live, it's completely tide dependent, so that is a HUGE variable that really doesn't maintain the accuracy all the time, so with that being said, I know that if I look at this forecast and hit it at the RIGHT tide, then the report will be accurate. If the forecast says 5feet at 9 seconds and I got at low tide, its going to be flat, so it doesn't matter what the Buoy says... And in intricate forecast scripting, those are the variables that are different regionally and super hard to program into your artificial intelligence. I actually have my own, private surf reporting and forecasting script. I figured out how to use PHP about years ago to tap into all the buoys, filter the information I want and then i spend MONTHS analysing the data as I surfed to see what factors were leading to misinformation. #1. Tide. #2, beach slope. I ran the same data on the west coast and had to completely reconfigure a 180 degree programming change to sift through the data and also account for the fact that 5ft at 11 seconds at a beach in San Diego translates into something completely different on Hilton Head Island. 5ft at 11 seconds in SD would mean usually, 6-8 foot beach break... 5ft at 11 seconds here translates into should to head high beach break.... So every beach is different, every stretch of coastline is different.... The GREAT thing about swell info is that they use the correct buoys... There is a HUGE difference in waves here and in folly. So, you can't just use the same data for Northern SC and Southern SC... Swellinfo has done a GREAT job making an accurate forecast and report based entirely on where I actually am... What I LOVED about surfline, living on the west coast was that for every major spot, even the free ones, they would send a grommet out to the beach at 6:45am and he would PHYSICALLY check the spots and post a REAL surf report. Like, Im standing in OB and its 2 feet overhead and super consistent. Wind is light offshore and there are 3 guys out... That made surfline by FAR the most accurate. But as huge swell would come in, surfline would get less accurate throughout the day. Usually, drastically UNDER calling size when its huge... Nothing like thinking its head high and you have your 6'1 and you get there and its 8-10 feet. That would happen a lot with surflines forecasting modules in the off season when they weren't doing 2 time spot checks daily.... And my MAJOR issue with surfline and the EC is that if you look at the data, they use the same reports and forecasts for HHI and Charleston. They do it all up and down the coast. Like in SC, they give our entire STATE a forecast and report... Really? Thats like giving North Jersey and South Jersey the same data all the time... NOT CORRECT.... Anyway dude, this is the best you will find. They listen, they always make it better and more accurate. So, I trust these guys more than anyone as of late. So, kudos to them for keeping up with everything.
Yeah....um you pretty much just repeated what I said to begin with. wtf? Seriously, try reading the whole thread rather than just attacking me because you think it's the popular thing to do on here.
THE ENTIRE ARGUMENT WAS THAT THE BUOY NEVER FAILS....IE NEVER....IE IT'S ALWAYS RIGHT. THAT'S THE ARGUMENT. HELLO!!!!!! THAT'S WHAT I TOOK ISSUE WITH. They may or may not fail; important not to forget 2/3 months ago some of us on this forum identified one that had actually FROZEN. (hee-hee…..i bet WE knew it before noaa did…)
to the op, go on the NOAA website find you area of interest on the map, look at the surrounding buoys... even the ones that might be further nsew, gather your info then check surfline and swell info. Nothing will be 100% but it sure beats wasting a ton of gas. It might take a bit to figure out what swell direction works best. Plan your trips a week out, then continue to check throughout the week. Sometimes your go to spot could change and you might have to drive an extra hour or two to score better conditions. Living inland you gotta pay to play. also, seeing that your are in the north east, you have a better chance of driving less and scoring more. Lots of different breaks facing every direction all within 8 hrs of one another
The buoy report is not failing. You are failing in your interpretation of the report and how its readings will affect your area. Theres a reason they are there, and its to tell mariners what the conditions of the ocean is. And shark-hunter you may wanna start here http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=44097 See just a quick google search turned up a buoy for RI, and it gives you the options of selecting all the other buoys around that one, from the ones far out to sea (which all seem to be down) to the ones in the bay (or whatever you guys call it).
Why do all the swell tracking open ocean buoys lack a damn $tide variable???? That is what is throwing off my personal equations. I have it down to where I can mathematically, for the most part, indicate, based on current wave heights how much smaller the waves will get based on the tide... But without a working $tide variable being output from the buoy, I can't link it. I have certain variables pulling from other buoys, but I have not figured out how to use PHP to load a data variable from a separate buoy and incorporate it into my algorithms... I can display the tide, using a separate php file and a small iframe, but why all the swell related buoys lack the tide variable is beyond me... It would make my life way easier, cause then I could really put myself on cruise control and trust the data that I have created wholeheartedly. Here is an image clip of some of my code. Its actually about 3200 lines of code. A lot of it is repetetive, but it filters fetch, swell angle, wind direction, wind speed, swell period, blah blah and it channels everything into different coordinate that are ideal for my location, thus filtering the data differently.... Its basically artificial intelligence that will translate ALL of the buoy data and give you EXACTLY what you need. Everyone can look at the data and say, okay, its 5feet at 8 seconds from the SSE and say, okay, this is what it SHOULD be like. My code actually cross references swell events of the past. Windows in which I have structured the filtering to show what angles are ideal and what translates into larger or smaller surf than anticipated by general buoy data. Basically, I have gotten it SPOT on, except for the tide... FOrecasting is different. THis is just a program I wrote that will tell you the EXACT conditions of the surf. Live. It will tell you exactly how big the wave faces are, what the texture is and how consistent it is. And to date, its 100% accurate.
And that is just a couple line of the Wind Data filtering. It will calculate drift and current based on windspeed, direction, swell direction etc... That is just the tip of the iceberg setting up the wind direction variables so when they are cross references with the swell angle it will tell you if its sideshore, offshore, clean, victory at sea etc.
WOW!! REALLY!? Oh wow.... Thank you so much for telling me about block island buoy station 44097 that I clearly mentioned BEFORE, Thank you so much. I never knew about that one. Very few people know about that in ri....you know it actually is listed on the ri forecast page on swellinfo....go figure. You're really a treasure of information. Oh and just so you know genius, all the other ones in the "bay" are not in open ocean water. They have about as much wave action as Quonset point. This really is a clown show on here filled with arrogant beginners and veteran keyboard commanders.
Never seen anyone on this board fire away at everyone and anyone. Some of the dudes he's blowing up on are smart, down to earth braddahs that no one has problems with here ever.
