Thursday 2 23 17 morning call

Conditions were pretty bad all day yesterday and I ended up not getting in the water at all. I had a couple of opportunities (like foiling in harbor or windsurfing Hookipa in the afternoon), but I preferred to wait for the sunset, which instead didn't offer anything good. I had to come up with some mega zoom to make the photos interesting. This is Pavils.

Brother Brad.



5am significant buoy readings
South shore
1.4ft @ 8s from 180° (S)                      

1ft @ 15s from 288° (WNW)

Bit of wrap at the Lanai buoy and an interesting 8s straight south small read. I don't think either one is going to do much noticeable, but, as usual, check the webcams and you'll find out.

North shore
NW101

5.7ft @ 14s from 318° (NW)

 

Waimea

3.3ft @ 14s from 316° (NW)

 

Pauwela

5.3ft @ 8s from 72° (ENE)                      

3ft @ 14s from 320° (NW)

 

Below is the graph of the three reported buoys. NW101 shows that the swell should keep increasing all day, and that's what I drew with the blue dotted line. NOAA's WW3 model outputs 5f  14s at 6pm, while the Surfline one sees it peak at 6.8f 14s at 2pm. The first one feeds the second which then adds its own near shore elaborations. Just by looking at the NW101, my guess is that the Surfline one is well overestimated. We'll have the confirmation tomorrow.

In the meantime, there's still plenty windswell, which will be much more consistent than the NW sets.

 

NAM3km map at 7 shows 16 knots, but fortunately the 6am iWindsurf Hookipa reading is only 6mph.

 

MC2km also sees the wind between 15-20 knots (pink) all day until 3pm when the WRF model predicts it to ease up into the 10-15 range (grey). 

 

Current wind map shows:

0) the big and strong low pressure (unnumbered on the map) that I pointed out yesterday by posting the old school weather map full of isobars, already moved across the Aleutians and not doing much for us anymore.

1) a new small fetch off Japan that is going to do the same and move NE right away (not good)

2-3) two small and weak fetches

L2-L3) the position where two small lows will form in the next few days and generate small/medium size/period waves.

You can tell that this pressure distribution is not conducive to the formation of big swells. Nothing over 10f, in fact, in the Surfline extended forecast (till Mar 11). Obviously and nonetheless, winter is still far from being over yet.

 

PS. I just received a reply from the Windity guy about my suggestion of incorporating the WRF model in their maps (seen the unreliability of the updates of MC2km) and here's what he replied:
"Hi Giampaolo, thank you for the link. In the future we plan to add more weather models into the Windytv. I will put this on our backlog."