Central and Northern California forecasts have been launched! We are still in beta mode here, so please let us know if you have any comments/suggests, or you notice anything off with the web site. It may take a bit of time for you to become familiar with the Swellinfo.com forecast pages, but once you do, finding all the vital swell and weather info has never been made easier! Some notes on how to use the west coast forecasts: The Swellinfo.com forecasts are generalized forecasts for a particular region (not a particular spot forecast). So, when you first go to the santa cruz forecast page, the default text forecast on the left hand side of the page is for south facing breaks. This isn't for Steamer Lane or Pleasure Point, but a generalized forecast for the average south facing breaks. To view the text foreasts for alternate beach facing directions, click the beach direction box above the text forecasts. The surfplots give a potential surf height for all beach facing directions in an area. So for the Santa Cruz area, for example, this includes SSW, S, and SE facing beaches. The text forecasts, and surplots are there for guidance, but you will get the most info by viewing the raw swell data. You can click on "swellplots" and/or "view details" on the bottom left of the surf plots to view the swell height, direction, and period for that particular area. Let us know if you have any thoughts, questions, suggestions, etc...
Hi Art, I noticed we had an error in our Marin County forecast, and this has been fixed. Let me know if you have find anything else wierd. Were still in beta mode here. Thanks!
fixed Just clicked back and it checks out. Thanks for the quick reply. Site is awesome. Just getting used to it but stoked on the useful info!
features I use a pay site that does wind predictions (WW2) and has zoom and relocate features for swell modeling. Have you considered that?
I think what you are talking about is like a virtual buoy thing, so the site is grabbing data from the raw data files. Swellinfo also has this data, included in the "Hourly Section". These are cool features, However, this data will only get you so far as that data is an average of all the concurent swells... Swellinfo takes it several steps further, as the Swellinfo model outputs wave spectra data at specific locations and sorts the spectra into swell groups that you see in the "swell plots". The swell plots are the single most useful resources in making your own forecast. For wind predictions, do you mean ww3 (wavewatch3)? The Swellinfo wind predictions are based off of mulitple sources, including the ww3 winds.
wind model The site uses WW2 but the one I find more reliable is GFS. As far as their buoy data, they do something called virtual but it sorts the swell roughly by direction but it's not as refined as the wave period bands from the directional buoys. The wave data seems to be some sort of average for sure, sorted more or less by compass point, but for the swell reported they provide an actual compass direction by degrees. Not sure how it's compiled but its better than what most sites even pretend to do and not completely inaccurate. I haven't had time to try your hourlies yet but will bark back when I check it out. Still digging the info and getting used to the format.
you should compare your other data to the swellplot data. The swellplot data is going to sort the concurrent swells most accurately...
