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Old 12-02-2004, 10:09 PM
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ricki ricki is offline
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Default Weather Planning, Realtime Wind Repts & More

For forecasts, I use NWS, Sat. imagry, wx maps and quite a few other resources. When it comes to timing the onset of frontal winds and whether or not you have to worry about squalls associated with a wet front I check out satellite loops (wunderunderground.com) and realtime winds (ikitesurf.com).

You can actually see the winds spike as it moves down the coast sometimes. This is for people that can't afford to hang out at the beach all day with a quiver of kites. I have timed the arrival of frontal winds for years this way. You just keeping looking in on the progress of the front from realtime winds and sat. images, checkout the trees and sky out the window and hit the beach, rig up within 30 minutes of the winds turning on. Sometimes, if you look north you can see white caps in the distance moving slowly south, soon a zone of higher waves/ripples will start to move towards you at a few miles an hour it seems. All of the sudden the wind can spike up. Ain't technology grand?! An example appears below.


Matanzas Inlet 11.16.04

If you check the Sat. images there is a fairly good chance that you might see a line of clouds passing over areas as the winds spike up say as happened at around 3:30 pm. You can track the movement of the front as it slides in from more northerly anenometer stations. Be sure to scope out the nature of the leading edge of the front through IR Sat. images and color radar. It may be a wet front with violent squalls in a narrow strip at the leading edge. You judge how fast the front is moving and time your setup on the beach backed up with color radar updates TO MISS the squall band at the leading edge of the front. You can receive color radar on your phones as well, its tiny but it may help you out a lot one day. Note the wind direction earlier in the morning, typically with approaching fronts the wind sweeps clockwise from SW to W to NW to N to NE, etc. You can see the shift of wind direction as the front moves through in the morning shown above.

I find the NWS forecasts fairly accurate if not a bit overstated, probably for liability purposes. When was the last time a monohaul sailor was lofted into a car because he failed to fully checkout the weather forecast first? There are quite a few parallels between kiteboarding and boating but there are also some dramatic differences when it comes to weather planning and monitoring particularly in South Florida. Getting caught in a 30 ft. sailboat if the winds gust to 40 mph from 15 mph isn't necessarily that big a deal. Having a kite up suitable for 15 mph and getting hit by a gust to 40 mph can ruin your day or life.

Lets say you are in a mood to do a road trip and overnight trip from West Palm Beach and wonder whether to travel north, south or west? Going without forecast and realtime wind data is leaving a great deal to chance. Why risk it? None of this is 100 % reliable of course but with time and experience you can make some fairly good judgments.

Here's another example. Say when you went to work in the morning you drove along the ocean and saw some nice conditions. You have your 10 m with you so you should be fine at 5:30 pm when you can get back to the beach, right? Not really. In fact unless you have a fairly large kite along, it may not be worth your while.



Aside from helping your choose what kites/boards to bring along and where to drive to potentially, realtime wind data can substantially improve your safety in weather planning for a session. Lets say you are suffering windlust big time in June. That is a fairly common thing in the summertime in Florida as you know.


Matanzas 6.26.04

Say you just got off work, it is around 5:30 pm you checkout the realtime wind report, looks ok for rigging big but you also checkout the color radar and see some fairly powerful squalls moving in? What do you do? Actually, I should ask, what should you do? How would you like to have been out with your 20 m kite up at around 7:30 pm? People have done it before of course although not all came through unmarked. Looking at the wind arrows at the top of the windgraph the rapid direction changes are a give away of squall activity.

Realtime wind can be used for a great deal more than these few examples . It is important to note that your winds on the water may differ from the realtime windgraphs. The similarity will vary station to station and even with wind direction sometimes. Still, with experience you learn what stations best represent what areas. Also, you can have a honking strong squall that passes two miles away from the anemometer station but over where you are riding. So, the records don't necessarily tell the whole story. There is always a need to be aware of the weather around you on a continuous basis when you are kiteboarding.

There are a variety of anemometer stations displayed on the ikitesurf site. Some are operated by ikitesurf such as those shown above. These sites have fairly complete data with average wind, gusts and lulls clearly shown. Some of the NWS sites only list intermittant average windspeed bars and gust dots. Still others show a continuous alignment of bars and dots. I think the ikitesurf data presentation is the easiest to use for wx planning. You have to subscribe to access those stations along with the archive wind data.

Some of the NWS sites are in unique locations, e.g. 5 miles off the Florida Keys and 120 ft. up! So, you will need to study and correlate ikitesurf data to conditions observed on the beach and offshore from station to station to learn to judge compensation factors. You can get windgraphs, radar and the whole shooting match on your Internet ready phone or PDA, weather planning to go. This stuff is there to be used so why not use it?
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