Just the beginning?...
SURF:
Our run of good surf continues. Lots of fun waves the past week and today we have more new NW hitting our beaches for shoulder high sets in north county SD and head high sets in SD.
We get a slight drop into Saturday then we get a reinforcement from the NW on Sunday for head high sets here and overhead sets towards SD. There's also a little waist high SW in the water but will be overrun by all the NW in the water this weekend. Water temps- wait for it- are 63 degrees. Which has more to do with the lack of storms and upwelling of cold water this winter than the supposed building El Nino (more on that below). But regardless- it would be nice to see the trend last until the end of spring and we can wear trunks on June 1st.
Tides the next few days are about 5' at sunrise, 0' mid-afternoon, and up to 4' at sunset. Make sure to keep up to date on the waves/weather at
Twitter/North County Surf.FORECAST:
After the good weekend of NW swell we get a building overhead NW on Monday afternoon into Tuesday.
By Thursday it's pretty small around here but models show some small but fun NW showing for next Friday.
On it's heels is a little bump of SW for the OC in the chest high range late next week and a better SW if the models hold late Sunday the 23rd.
WEATHER:
We've had a weak low pressure system hanging around longer than expected the past few days and I was hoping for sunny skies and light offshores already. But we've got another day of low clouds that will last into Saturday morning. By Sunday high pressure finally kicks in and we've got temps near 80 at the beaches and mid-70's on Monday. Yet another low pressure system moves down the west coast late Monday but it will stay inland so we won't get any rain from it- just more clouds and breezy conditions. After that the models show high pressure building again for nice weather the 2nd half of next week.
BEST BET:
Good NW swell on Sunday as well as temps at the beaches near 80. No brainer.
NEWS OF THE WEEK:
Put a quarter in the hype machine: El Nino is making a comeback. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration put us on watch last week and every major media outlet from the Reno Gazette Journal to the Huffington Post jumped all over it. The LA Times did a clear and concise story so I'm running with them for the purpose of the News of the Week. Long story short, we haven't been walloped by waves and weather in about 15 years (since the 1998 El Nino and the last major one before that was 1983- seeing a pattern here?) so we're about due.
Here's the LA Time's take on NOAA's announcement: "The odds are increasing that El Niño, the powerful climate phenomenon that alters precipitation patterns across the globe, will develop in the Pacific Ocean this year, U.S. government forecasters say. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center activated its alert system on Thursday to issue an El Niño watch.
The alert means that conditions in the eastern tropical Pacific are favorable enough that El Niño has a more than a 50% chance of forming by the summer or fall. Though it’s too early to predict with much confidence, if El Niño re-emerges it could produce wetter weather in the southern United States next winter, bring more rain to California, temper the Atlantic hurricane season and push up global temperatures in 2015, experts say. The El Niño cycle begins every two to seven years when weak trade winds in the Pacific allow warmer water to build up along the west coast of South America. El Niño conditions often result in higher rainfall in California, but not always.
Typically, they cause the jet stream to dip south over North America, directing storms to the California coast and across the southern U.S. La Niña, the cycle's cool-water counterpart, is associated with drier weather in those regions. If El Niño returns this year it would be the first since 2009-10, a moderate episode that was followed by the next season by La Niña. For the past two years the eastern tropical Pacific has remained in neither a cool nor warm state some experts have referred to as "La Nada." Thursday’s forecast by the Center for Climate Prediction and International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University, gave a 52% probability of El Niño developing by the fall, compared with a 41% chance of conditions remaining neutral.
Mike Halpert, acting director of the Climate Prediction Center, said scientists have observed a warming of sub-surface waters that has been “fairly impressive.” “We're seeing a fair amount of evolution towards El Niño below the surface and we're getting some confirmation from a number of our computer models,” he said. “It looks pretty good at this point.” Thursday's El Niño watch follows several months of forecasts based on observations from satellites, buoys and floats and computer models that have shown increasing signs El Niño could return later this year. Halpert cautioned that El Niño forecasts before spring are notoriously unreliable because of volatile ocean and atmospheric conditions.
Predictions made this early in past years, he said, have sometimes failed to play out. The last major El Niño, an unusually powerful episode in 1997-98, brought rainfall more than 200% above normal to Southern California. Powerful storms hit the coast, triggering destructive landslides and floods. With California still in a drought, the state might be more open to the risks posed by El Niño if it meant an influx of needed rain, Halpert said. “For the folks in California, this might be a case where they would welcome that,” he said. “You might take a bit of the bad to refill your reservoirs.”
So there you have it. We've jinxed it and we'll have a dry winter next year with no surf. But I hope NOAA is right.
BEST OF THE BLOG:
It's finally ready. Almost. The Encinitas Community Park is due to open at the end of spring- once the grass grows and the skaters have had their fill BEFORE the park opens. Confused? Read the story on the North County Surf blog. As well as a mid-week Surf Check and an in-depth THE Surf Report- all of that and more in the blog below!
PIC OF THE WEEK:
What floats your boat? The solid drop out the back? The middle carve section? Or the inside grinder? Or are you greedy like me and want all 3? In the immortal words of Gordon Gecko 'Greed, for the lack of a better word, is good'.
Keep Surfing,
Michael W. Glenn
Death Defying
Future Lottery Winner
Rick Kane Called Me J.O.J.
