Okay, so here is an actual application of this data that I am looking for... So, in the late spring and summer down here, a lot of the near shore fronts create a lot of drift, but super fun, super consistent, mixed up swell. Days like yesterday were probably the most fun I had all year last year, including hurricane season, which was a bust.... So simply asked: I saw where the swell angle came from, I know what the Buoys read (5ft @ 6 seconds), which sounds like crap, but it was super fun.... So, once a swell event happens, how can we actually go data mining and find out what the weather systems were doing leading up to it? The wind was unfavorable, but without it, the local windswell would have been much weaker.... So, I am trying to collect all the factors that lead up to a swell like the one that came here yesterday, so I can put that in my swell log and look out for similar conditions in the future... Swell info was correct, mostly in the prediction, but the buoys ended up being almost 1.5 feet higher than predicted... still at a short period, but SI was dead on with the NNE winds that were just RAGING... I could do without that.... Last summer was easy for me. I was working with an ocean view, on the beach, with 3 boards in my office. I never even looked at the forecast. I would look outside, and if there were waves, I would walk out and surf... Which is why I scored all summer... But now that I'm a mile away from the beach at work, I would love to know what it was that made the swell yesterday come together.
It might have been some fetch heading your way beginning Friday night maybe. That is thinking backwards, but if you do that, then you can look for a source of fetch on Thursday/Friday that develops. Usually this happens in your area from a weather system kicking off the coast and heading a bit north and a bit east to set up a favorable angle of sustained NE winds over a good stretch of ocean. Those tornadic low pressures coming across the heartland will do that. We are due for some groundswell mid week down here in souff and centro FL from a developing low. Maybe you'll get it too.
Yeah, tuesday is looking like it is going to pick up a bit here. What do you mean by "Tornadic low pressures".... So, I guess what I want to look at is this... There was a system out in the ocean, obviously, kicking this wind swell at us with a decent fetch. The reason the periods were so short, is because the wind switch and started kicking side shore, keeping it down into the 6 second or so range, and the amount of force coming from the sideshore was actually wedging up the wave as they broke, rather than just toppling over from a straight onshore.... But I guess what I am asking is this... Saturday afternoon and evening, we had some system that produced rain right to the west of us. It was pushing over from Texas/The Panhandle, and based on the radar, ir started pushing up to the north before it hit us.... On Saturday, the windswell was coming in and was pushing from the east obviously, so I want to backtrack and look at the "weather" leading up to yesterday.... I want to see how the combination of what was coming our way from the west/southwest and colliding with whatever was out at sea. Those factors seems to have created "the perfect" storm... If the winds wouldnt have been so crazy, it would have been pretty epic.... I just want to look back, see what the weather was doing friday, saturday and sunday morning both to the south and west of me, as well as where the swell was coming in from... I.E. how close to shore was the center of the storm on in the atlantic, what path was it taking around sunday at noon and what was the weather doing on the other side of me.... Does anyone know if weather.com or any of the major weather sits logs radar data or storm tracking? Most functions on all the sites are a "future" or report pattern.... I know that in surfline, if you pay the membership fees, you can use LOLA to backtrack all the swell data... Hint Hint Micah =)... That would be pretty sweet.... But since I haven't had a membership to SL in like 10 years, I really don't know where to start to go back and check things out... My next door neighbor is a fishing charter captain and a certified kite board instructor... When he got home last night, he told me that yesterday was "As Epic as it gets" for kiteboarding. I was watching dude out just getting ridiculous air and stuff... I would just like to know for all of our sakes, what all these factors were leading up to such a strange, mixed up but fun swell event. I didn't setup my private site to record the data, it just reads it and predicts.... I know if I go ot NOAA's buoy, it should show me the previous data. Not sure how far back, but im gonna start there.
I don't know but I'd be intrested to find out. I would imagine weather.com would have that information. When I have time later I'll look around a bit and let you know what I find
try wunderground.com they're the nerd version of weather.com. I know they have basic historical weather info.
NOAA has their BUOY data back through yesterday, so I just copied that. Also found yesterdays weather on weather.com, but there is no radar maps, just conditions every 30 minutes, which is basically the same as the buoy data. I did stuble upon some pretty cool historical buoy data and info on there. Downloadab in Zip format... Nerding around right now with that... Pretty much the same data that MSW probably pulls from for their historical data, but I would trust the noaa buoys over them all day.
Here is a snapshot of what the BUOY did yesterday. Could only get it from NOON on, but that is right when I paddled out... The periods leave a little to be desired, but you can see they got some length to the periods randomly throughout the day.
Look at the Atlantic Ocean radar today. Huge cyclonic rotation off the East Coast. This produced really fun head high + east swell for NJ yesterday and today, about 5-6 feet at 10-11 seconds. This swell was not generated from local weather/wind conditions.
Just did a quick search for "may 10th radar weather map new York" and found this. Tried it for south Carolina but didn't get nothing. Here's the link maybe you can navigate the site to get your area. http://www.wunderground.com/weather-radar/united-states/okx/history/2014-05-10
SWEET! Thanks bro. Had to hack around on the site for a while. Closest I can get is Charleston, but it shows all the way down to Florida... Wicked tool http://preview.wunderground.com/weather-radar/united-states/clx/history/?date=2014-05-31
