by Mike Higgins
- BASK's
own Storm
Steiger has an excellent personal web site with a page of
weather information.
- The
National Weather Service has a Weather Forcast Office for the San
Francisco Bay Area and Monterey with pointers to many essential
weather pages for kayakers.
- The
NOAA has an interactive
map that will tell you the current wind and wave conditions all
around the world.
- An alternative to the above interactive link lets you choose observational zones.
- The
most popular local weather station is Buoy
46026 off San Francisco Bay.
- The Weather Underground page for marine weather in the bay area.
- The
CDIP and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography generate wave spectrum
charts and computer wave height prediction maps in the California Swell Model
page. This is a really cool image that tells you how high the swell
will be in different bays and which direction the swell will come from.
They also provide a 3 day wave
forecast which kayakers can use to plan their weekend! They show Pt. Reyes buoy here.
- Scripps
also builds a map with data from land stations, CDIP and NOAA buoys all
combined on one map of Northern California.
- The
US Navy makes their 5 day
forecasts of wave height available in graphical form.
- National Weather Service Ocean Prediction Center predicts sea state for mariners. It has a user guide here.
- National Weather Service facsimile ocean state predictions based on Pt. Reyes.
- North Bay Weather site maintains information and weather cameras for the north bay area.
- Tides.
I am not fond of the user interface of any of the many tide predictors
on the WEB. None of them so far can pack the punch of the graphical
user interface you get from a glance at a page from The Tidelog. The
Tidelog is a dead-tree (printed on paper) daily planner calendar
available from good bookstores or contact Pacific Publishers
(415)868-2909. Each page shows one week of tide height, tide current at
two locations (for the San Francisco edition), sunrise, sunset,
moonrise, moonphase, moonset, the position of the planets, meteor
showers, solar and lunar eclipses. Some data is displayed graphically
and numerically.
- Tides
on the web, if you must, you can scroll down through the north ->
south list to find the site you want at Dean Pentcheff's west coast list,
for other regions try the main page of Dean Pentcheff's tide predictor.
If you want the pretty graphs scroll down and select the options you
want then click on "Make Prediction ..."
- The
US Geological Survey and San Jose State University have an interesting
site that includes a map showing real-time San
Francisco Bay Wind Pattern Streaklines and other interesting
stuff.
- The
Call of the Wind has free Wind Reports (you
must subscribe to get them in real time) on the WEB. This is an
interesting company that privately funds weather stations by selling
weather information pagers to surfers, windsurfers and perhaps
kayakers! As federal and state agencies cut back on programs and remove
buoys, I hope that private companies like this will be able to supply
us with weather data.
- Local
Knowledge has sample weekend current predictions at several
times and locations around The Bay. They sell software services to
provide more detailed predictions at ANY point and time throughout the
year.
This collection of links and rambling philosophical comments
should be blamed on Mike Higgins who has his own extensive kayaking journal
online.
Text copyright © 1998-2005 by BASK.
