Feb 27 2010
Playing the Stormy Weather Game
When I first got to the coast, I had fled from a lifetime of what I referred to as “snow farming”, aka working in the snow skiing industry. I wasn’t going to have to worry much about weather anymore I thought wistfully…after all if there was going to be any weather it was going to be coming from out across that ocean and we would know everything we needed to know about it, right? I really couldn’t have been much more wrong. Weather here. along the upper reaches of the Southern California coast is pretty unpredictable sometimes.
We lie in the lee of North America’s “Cape Horn”, known as Point Conception. It’s interaction with the sea helps create a layer of unknown. To our East lies a mountain range that reaches high alpine altitudes which then spill out onto the Western edge of the Great Basin Desert. To our Southeast are the Santa Monica mountains. They help guarantee our weather will be different than on the other side!
When storms approach from the Northwest as they often do, the location of the low can determine what the outcome may be. It can stay offshore or run down the East side of the Sierra’s creating entirely different storm situations.
Today, the “Dock Commodore” and I had to make the tough decision to cancel our monthly Full Moon Frolic. It’s a popular Member-run fun event that everyone enjoys a lot. Mind you, the general forecast for our impending storm has been revised three times in three days. When the prognostication was that the system had slowed it seemed like it would occur during the Frolic itself so that was the signal to call it off. I like to caveat any of my predictions by saying, “now it can be nice”.
I’ve been running my amateur weather station here for some years now and continue to find new tools to help. The original NOAA graphical is still good to use for comparison against the hybrid SailFlow. Lately I’ve also been using WindMapper and WindFinder. They are good to get to know because in many cases, if you travel to sail they will be what you use. Over on the weather page I also have a variety of jetstream and surface pressure maps as well as radar and hybrid aggregators like StormPulse. Not only are there forecasting tools, you can find out what the weather is like here right now without leaving home.
I’m all set for it to be a beautiful clearing evening tomorrow now that we’ve made our predictions. But I feel better making the call to give people coming from near and far a decision in time for them to be able to change their plans.
We canceled an event a few weeks only to have a wonderful afternoon…it’s always so hard! I always suggest to members to bring a movie when they come to sail…if the weather isn’t conducive to sailing, it’s fun to watch a movie like Master and Commander on board a rolly boat.