Out like a lion and in like a lamb.
SURF:
Some pretty darn fine surf last weekend. The combo swells lit up most beaches and the weather cooperated by Sunday too.
FORECAST:
The unique WSW swell on Sunday evening spills into Monday and is joined by a new shoulder high SW. The showers hopefully will taper off by then and that new SW swell lasts into Tuesday. On it's heels is another SW for chest high+ waves filling in Thursday. And after that we have a new WNW on the charts that should fill in next Saturday- but maybe some light showers again though- but that's a long way off.
WEATHER:
In regards to that unique storm sitting off our coast, charts last week had that thing slamming into us with a ton of rain. That's not the case anymore as it just continues to move parallel to us and we'll only get a glancing blow with light showers Sunday evening into Monday. Best case is 1/4" of rain, light S wind, and cloudy skies. Looks like nice weather is lining up though Tuesday to Thursday next week with temps in the mid to high 60's and clear skies. Models then show another weak storm trying to take aim at us towards Friday but I'm not fretting about it since the charts have been off lately and winter is officially over.
BEST BET:
Hard to say- that unique WSW swell angle may be fun late Sunday but we may have some light S wind and showers. So probably next Thursday with the new SW swell and nice weather.
NEWS OF THE WEEK:
Seems like over the past few years storms have been gettin’ meaner. Have you noticed around here it’s been either all or nothing for us? We get a big storm or we get nothing at all- there’s no in-between. There's little doubt -- among scientists that is -- that the climate has warmed since people began to release massive amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere during the Industrial Revolution. But ask a scientist if the weather is getting stormier as the climate warms and you're likely to get a careful response that won't make for a good quote. There's a reason for that. "Although many people have speculated that the weather will get stormier as the climate warms, nobody has done the quantitative analysis needed to show this is indeed happening," says Jonathan Katz, PhD, professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis. In the March 17 online version of Nature Climate Change, Katz and Thomas Muschinksi, a senior in physics who came to Katz looking for an undergraduate thesis project, describe the results of their analysis of more than 70 years of hourly precipitation data from 13 U.S. sites looking for evidence of increased storminess. They found a significant, steady increase in storminess on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, which famously suffers from more or less continuous drizzle, a calm climate that lets storm peaks emerge clearly. "Other sites have always been stormy," Katz says, "so an increase such as we saw in the Olympic Peninsula data would not have been detectable in their data." They may also be getting stormier, he says, but so far they're doing it under cover. "We didn't want to know whether the rainfall had increased or decreased," Katz says, "but rather whether it was concentrated in violent storm events. "Studies that look at the largest one-day or few-day precipitation totals recorded in a year, or the number of days in which total precipitation is above a threshold, measure whether locations are getting wetter, not whether they're getting stormier, says Katz. To get the statistical power to pick up brief downpours rather than total precipitation, Muschinski and Katz needed to find a large, fine-grained dataset. "So we poked around," Katz says, "and we found what we were looking for in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration databases." NOAA has hourly precipitation data going back to 1940 or even further for many locations in the United States. Muschniski and Katz chose 13 sites that had long runs of data and represented a broad range of climates, from desert to rain forest. They then tested the hypothesis that storms are becoming more frequent and intense by taking different measurements of the "shape" formed by the data points for each site. Measuring these "moments" as they're called, is a statistical test commonly used in science, says Katz, but one that hasn't been applied to this problem before. "We found a significant steady increase in stormy activity on the Olympic Peninsula," Katz says. "We know that is real." "We found no evidence for an increase in storminess at the other 12 sites," he said, "but because their weather is intrinsically stormier, it would be more difficult to detect a trend like that at the Olympic Peninsula even if it were occurring." The next step, Katz says, is to look at a much larger number of sites that might be regionally averaged to reveal trends too slow to be significant for one site. "There are larger databases," he says, "but they're also harder to sift through. Any one site might have half a million hourly measurements over the period we're looking at, and to get good results. We have to devise an algorithm tuned to the database to filter out spurious or corrupted data." What does all this mean? The hunch seems correct storms are a little stronger and there’s a lot of work to be done to sift through all that data for a conclusion- hopefully we have an answer before we get more storms like Sandy.
BEST OF THE BLOG:
Rip Curl is all over the place lately- from the award winning F Bomb fullsuits this winter to the Bells contest going on this week to new stores popping up- like the one across the street from Swami's? Doesn't mean I have to go to Trestles anymore! Well to surf Lowers of course. Check out the story on the North County Surf blog. And of course 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:
Is it good or is it bad? Looks fast, breaking over a shallow shelf, pretty meaty, and a solid barrel. That's the good- not the bad of course. The bad? No one out to share it with. I guess that's good too.
Keep Surfing,
Michael W. Glenn
High Roller
UFOlogist
Discovered a New Spot Just North of Tijuana Sloughs and South of Fort Point
