Sunday, December 6, 2009

Slop for Monday – Looking stormy

Monday is not looking like a surf day for most spots.

Our WNW-NW swell (285-300) will be building on Monday but stormy conditions are forecast to move in early on Monday morning and keep things sloppy throughout the day.

The WNW energy is actually going to be a mix of all sorts of stuff…leftover energy from the weekend, some local short-period windswell, and some long-period energy from the first part of that larger storm system building in the North Pacific. The long-period stuff (and the leftovers) will be showing in the morning, particularly at spots up in the SB and Ventura areas, but the shorter-period storm/windswell will be building in through the day…check out the difference in the swell forecasts between the am and the pm. Oh and there is a little SW pulse out in the water too.





Surfwise we can expect the average exposed spots to be around waist-chest high…more consistent in areas that normally like winter energy and less consistent and smaller in the lesser exposed regions. Top NW facing breaks will be around chest-shoulder high with some head high sets on the lower tides. Looks like all spots will be bigger as the windswell fills in through the afternoon.

Really I am not sure why I am going into so much detail on this forecast…the weather looks like poop on Monday. We have a pretty chilly cold front moving down from the north that is going to carve right into a bunch of warm/moisture that is holding over Socal…no sh*t, I believe that the NWS is describing this air-mass as “juicy”…not sure I have ever heard that one before. Anyway the mix of the cold front and the “juicy” air-mass is supposed to be pretty nasty…something like 1-2 inches of rain along the coast and some areas potentially seeing nearly 4 inches of rain. Snow-levels are supposed to drop to about 2000 feet too which is crazy.

Ok so for the morning it looks like S-SE to S-SW winds blowing through most of Socal…more SE’erly up by Santa Barbara and more SW’erly down by San Diego. Winds will be around 10-15 knots for the morning and then building 15-25 knots, with 30-35 knot gusts by the afternoon. Gale warnings and in effect for the offshore areas.



Something to keep in mind…even though the forecast has all this nastiness line up for tomorrow it really depends on how fast the cold front moves in. If it stalls or shifts its track, the timing could change and we might see some a small window of conditions. As I usually do when we have swell in the water, I think that it will be worth at least a cam check in the morning...hopefully things will hold together just long enough that we can pick off a few.

Here are the tides…

12/07/2009 Monday
01:41AM LST 4.0 H
06:47AM LST 2.5 L
12:22PM LST 4.8 H
07:44PM LST 0.0 L

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey Adam is the surf going to be sweet wen and thurs for the SB area bro?