Or 'Late Edition' since I dropped the ball last week.
SURF:
Sorry for the missing THE Surf Report last week. I went to San Fran to surf some fun waves (and duck diving in 58 degree water- not fun).
Had some fun surf here though on either side of the cold front on Tuesday. Today we had clean weather with a building but small SW and smaller background NW for chest high waves.
The SW hangs around this weekend from a late season storm off Antarctica and we'll get shoulder high sets towards the OC. Sunday afternoon the NW starts to pick up but we also have windy conditions from yet another cold front entering our window (more on that below in the WEATHER section). Water temps are starting to drop from all the cold fronts lately but are still hanging around in the mid 60's.
And tides the next few days are 4' at sunrise, up to 5.5' mid-morning, and down to 0' at sunset.
FORECAST:
After the fun surf Saturday and messy conditions late Sunday, Monday is bumpy as the cold front moves through the region. On the bright side it should be overhead. Tuesday will have leftover NW windswell for shoulder high waves and the rest of the week looks... small.
There's nothing going on in the Southern Hemisphere of any significance and charts are only show some jumbled energy in the north Pacific. Best case is to see some chest high NW late next week. So in the meantime, don't take tomorrow for granted!
WEATHER:
This is the part of the program in which I usually complain about our lack of an El Nino winter. But not today! I'm being optimistic as technically it's still fall and the peak of El Nino is about a month away. And the biggest El Nino of all time ('97-'98) didn't unleash it's fury until late winter/early spring. So we've got plenty of time people! In the meantime, we've got great fall weather on tap this weekend with a mild 'Santa Ana' condition. Look for temps in the low 70's along the coast during the day and high 50 at night. We have yet another 'dry' cold front forecasted to sweep through late Sunday which will give us a small chance of showers and gusty winds into Monday. Then the Santa Ana returns the middle of next week for more sunny skies and warm temps. And when our El Nino finally hits with torrential rain and monster surf, I'll let you know. Make sure to keep up to date on the waves/weather at
Twitter/North County Surf.
BEST BET:
Get it early this weekend before the storm moves in!
NEWS OF THE WEEK:
Even though our Eastern Pacific hurricane season seems to have run its course, the Accumulated Cyclone Energy, which measures the combined strength and duration of tropical storms and hurricanes, was 50% above normal this year. Not too shabby. We had 20 named storms with 10 having sustained winds over 100 mph and 7 of those with winds over 140 mph. And one- Patricia- steamrolled Mexico’s southwest resort coast as the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere with sustained winds of 200 mph.
Phil Klotzbach of Colorado State University had this to say about the wild Pacific hurricane season: “So far this year, there have been a total of 21 Category 4 and 5 storms (winds over 131 mph) in the North Pacific (i.e. Eastern, Central, and Western Pacific), shattering the old record of 17, set in 1997 (the biggest El Nino of all time).And all these storms almost certainly owe their strength to a monster El Niño stacked atop climate change.
Wired Magazine reported recently that Patricia’s 200 mph winds were so strong that it technically could be considered a category 6 storm if the Saffir-Simpson scale went that high (the highest on the scale is a category 5 at 156+ mph). In addition to its unprecedented winds, Patricia broke the record for lowest pressure in any hurricane on record. With a minimum central pressure of 880 millibars (25.99 inches of mercury) at the 4 a.m. CDT advisory Oct. 23, Patricia broke the record of 882 millibars set by Wilma in the Atlantic Basin almost exactly 10 years earlier. Around 1 p.m. CDT Oct. 23, the minimum central pressure reached its lowest point, 879 millibars (25.96 inches of mercury).
“First of all, when you have an El Niño in place the surface waters are going to be very warm,” says James Kossin, atmospheric research scientist at NOAA’s Center for Weather and Climate in Wisconsin. And this year’s El Niño—ranked as one of the strongest on record—is affecting waters that are already warmer, due to decades of climate change. “This is a fairly good example of what we expected to happen,” says Kossin. “The theory and models said one thing global warming would do is have the strongest storms get stronger.”
Warm water is like gasoline for a hurricane’s engine. Atmospheric conditions help it stay revved. “Hurricanes are really just rings of thunderstorms, and in order to be really efficient the air needs to be vertically stacked in order to properly converge heat into the middle,” Kossin says. An undulating band of warm equatorial air, called the Intertropical Convergence Zone, kept the eastern Pacific’s atmosphere stable enough for all that oceanic warmth to convect its way to Patricia’s center.
But people in the path of Patricia’s Mexican landfall caught a small break.- vertical wind shear. When the winds in the lower, middle, and upper atmosphere are moving at different speeds, or in radically different directions, it disrupts a hurricane’s convection, which helped quelch Patricia’s engine before it hit land. Plus, Patricia headed east, where mountains knocked it down even further. But it still dumped rain. A LOT OF RAIN- and even produced flooding across large areas of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.
The waters in the Eastern Pacific are still well above average when it comes to temperature- and our hurricane season still has 18 days left; so there’s still a chance for more storms to form. Don’t believe me? Ask Tropical Storm Omeka which formed on December 18th in 2010. Wouldn’t that be a great Xmas present this year…
PIC OF THE WEEK:
There are just so many things completely wrong with this photo. Is it the swirling boil in the background just waiting to release your fins on a bottom turn? Is it the 4' speed bump formed by the water draining off the reef? Or is it the lip cascading down like the teeth of a Great White shark? Whatever it is, I'll pass.
Keep Surfing,
Michael W. Glenn
Cream of the Crop
Playing 3rd Stormtrooper From the Left In The Force Awakens
Offering THE Surf Report For Free on Black Friday
