Saturday f'u'cast for OCMD just went from blue / green to RED. Muted screams of agony are heard throughout the east coast. I can barely stifle my yawn.
i found the formula out pretty quickly. its green and blue all the way up till the day before, then it becomes red the day before. crushing all your hopes and dreams of that awesome day you were planning.
sometimes the difference in red and blue is one degree wind speed or adding some west or east or whatever is bad in that area. Look at the overall wind data and find your best beach for that and the swell.
yeah many times the colors are BS, they attempt to dumb down the info for the average barney to understand. Disregard the coloring and it is pretty useful if you know anything at all about your spot. Most blue days are a freaking blast in my town. Some red days are like 7 kts on shore, not the best conditions but not exactly blown out either. You make the call, the green man is an fickle b*tch and he is always tripping nuts.
Find someone with an Air Nautique, a couple thousand pounds of ballast, $600 for gas and go wake surfing!
Winds at the beach are the hardest thing to forecast. Anything past 48 hours is a complete guess. Really need to be within the 24 hour window to know what the winds are most likely going to be doing.
When you see a little flip flopping of the winds, a lot of times it is due to the disagreement between the weather models. You can see the GFS wind, represented as wind barbs on the wave maps. The NAM wind is represented in the nearshore wind maps. I also want to make local maps of the GFS winds sometime soon. The North America Model, is a higher resolution model that can often represent local winds better. Need to put some time into a good How to Use, and FAQ section.
I think a big wind forecasting issue for any surf forecast from about March - August is sea breeze. When inland temps are 90+ degrees out almost everyday, and the water is 15-20 degrees colder, sea breeze can turn a 5-10 mph offshore wind into a 10 mph onshore wind within a matter a minutes. some days it happens mid morning other days waits right until i get off work and then kick in. It also seems to tweak a SW wind into a S wind and NW wind into a N wind, creating a lot of sideshore conditions.. Good luck with sea breeze...i guess it falls more into micro-climate scale.
