Saturday, September 20, 2014

Swellmap Vs Nelsonboardriders Round 1

Dear SwellMap Feedback:
Hi guys, just some simple feedback on your forecasting for the nelson area. your forecast changes dramatically every 6 hours to the point of it not really holding any confidence , eg: late last night forecasting a 2metre swell for the morning only to change at 4am to 0.7m.... this has been a trend over the last 3 months both up and down in forecasts and if the foerecast changes every 6 hours then its not really a forecast is it....?? Other swell forecasting sites such as buoyweather dot com are far more reliable at present and its sad to see your forecasts for our area so "out of touch".... please i eagerly await your reply and please include what i have written above so i may publish it, thanks,

Swellmap: Replys!!


Thank you for your feedback. It’s great to hear from people using the website.

We’ve just recovered from a 36 hour outage, during that time the high resolutions wave models weren’t running and you were seeing information from the low resolution models. This is the weather information often used by mobile phone weather apps and is a rough indication of sea conditions. Some weather sites run completely from this information.

We use these low resolutions models as a backup and to seed our high resolution models, however the low resolution models are around 64 km which misses many of the unique features of New Zealand. On the boating part of swellmap if the models fall back to the low resolution version we automatically fail ‘safe’ as the information is not good enough to properly understand the ocean conditions.
I’m happy to report that our high resolution models are back up and running and we have put additional measures in place to keep them running.
It’s quite possible that Nelson is a unique area that the low resolution models don’t predict well.
We are constantly tweaking and improving the models. We’re currently working on a system that will help us measure and record the accuracy of our models over time which will help us improve.
I’m sorry our system predicted a good swell for you and the ocean didn’t deliver. From the sound of your blog a false positive is not a good thing. To help I suggest getting a second opinion from other weather websites. It’s always good to get more perspectives on the weather. If all sites agree then it’s probably more likely. Just don’t get a second opinion from metservice as well - we provide the marine information to metservice so it will just tell you the same thing as swellmap.
Thank you again for your feedback. I wish Nelson lots of swell in the future. We are planning on investigating some seasonal forecasts - predicting long term trends. I’ll let you know if we get that system up and running, and if it predicts more swell for Nelson.


Cheers,



Stay Tuned for more adventures as bitter Nelson surfers wage war on Internet surf forecasters .....

Saturday, September 6, 2014

Nelson being Nelson.

Another teaser of a groundswell over the last couple of days with only the occasional head high set in perfect conditions and long waiting periods between sets has left most people a little highly strung with the thought that even though its great to get waves  its almost worse to get marginal waves especially in those perfect conditions, A few people in the lineup spouting the words "worst swell season ever", which got me thinking.... Do we even have a swell season??, would we conclude April-October to be our swell "season"?? Is this the worst 'swell season' ever?? Or are we infact just being pining little moaners as infact, in reality its just Nelson being Nelson......... and so continues the love/hate relationship.
Food for thought, next week looks promising...... and so it goes again.

A late congratulation and apology for oversight to another local surfer Mr Wes Smith on the birth of his baby boy Toby!! Both Wes and Gary doing their part in sustaining Nelson's surfing populous.
and A MASSIVE BIG HAPPY FATHERS DAY TO ALL YOU DADS!!!!!!

See you next swell season.

Just When you thought it was over someone grabs you by the cucumber 🥒

What’s really going on .....