Watch the ebb or flow of ephemeral fog at the Golden Gate or the rapid movements of puffball cumulus clouds during a summer day, and you quickly realize that forecasting cloud coverage is often a crap shoot. Clouds form and evaporate with random temperature changes, elevation changes, relative humidity, vertical movement, aerosols. Etc. But supercomputer…
As you can see in the blog imagery, a weak tropical storm about 700 miles SW of Cabo Wabo is pumping clouds into a weak sub-tropical jetstream, which is sending clouds over a glassy Sea of Cortez. The Multimodel Ensemble Forecast (geekspeak for the consensus of 13 models) suggests about 50% coverage today, which jibes…
If you are an ikitesurf.com or iwindsurf.com subscriber, you can use this link for the actual launch sites forecast: San Francisco Bay Area 3x daily forecast. Note: The phrases in bold below are in the forecast imagery. The bands of clouds overhead will thicken as a rainy cold front 200 miles west of the Golden Gate moves…
If you are an ikitesurf.com or iwindsurf.com subscriber, you can use this link for the actual launch sites forecast: San Francisco Bay Area 3x daily forecast. Today, a sliver of the North Pacific High is creating 8g10 NW winds at the San Francisco ocean buoy 17 miles west of the Golden Gate. But the demise…
The 2023 El Niño emerged in June 2023 and is expected to persist through the winter of 2023-2024 and there is a 75-85% chance that it will peak as a strong El Niño event this winter. Remember, the impact of El Niño on our winter wind will be episodic. There will be many periods when…
It is hard to describe complex weather patterns without using some jargon. Here is a jargon Decoder for today’s forecast. While it does not explain everything it at least gives you a visual of what these parts of the wind machine look like today. Weak winds everywhere as the bulk of the North Pacific High…
Have you ever wondered why Baja’s Sea of Cortez only has weak southerly winds in the Summer while the rest of North America is having its peak kiting, winging and windsurfing season? And why does the Sea of Cortez have its strongest winds in the winter when the rest of North America only has sporadic…
Today, both Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area had sites with unusually strong winds for mid-October. This was due to part of the North Pacific High being unusually far north for this time of year. Plus early season wintery storms have been pushing a ridge from the NPH close to the California coast….
Southern California and San Francisco wingers, kiters and windsurfers know the spring time drill. As storms rainy southerly winds depart we see strong NW wind from the North Pacific High. Of course it is fall now but nothing is suprising weatherwise these days. But what is really different is that todays NW winds for the…
So you all know the spring ti me routine. In April through mid-May many storms are followed by clearing and then NW winds. These fabled NW winds clearing winds are accelerated by low-pressure that develops inland in the wake of a passing storm. As Global Weirding progresses we are sometimes seeing NW clearing winds at…