Random forecast update – North Pacific, wait what?

So remember when, about 5 minutes ago, I was saying that that it felt like someone flicked the weather switch to “fall”…well apparently they also pushed the NPAC button too.

Check it out…our first semi-legit looking storm in the North Pacific Storm track in quite a while…and hey it even has winds inside our swell window.



That image is from the QuikSCAT satellite…so this storm is happening right now, which means the NW-WNW exposed spots will be picking up some waves from this early season storm by this weekend. It won’t be huge or anything but it does look like it will be a rideable swell. It will help that the swell will get reinforced by local windswell that pops up through the afternoon as it shows.

Here is another shot of the storm on the NOAA sats…



If you watch the storm in actual movement you will see that it isn’t a great swell maker for Socal (at this point). Most of the winds are going very North to South on the backside of the storm, which means that the swell will go North to South instead of WNW like we want it too.

Fortunately there are some winds lining up for our region…at this point I am expecting new WNW-NW swell (290-300+) to start moving into SoCal on Saturday, hitting the Northern Counties (Ventura) starting in the morning and then filling in further South (South Bay, North OC, and San Diego) later in the afternoon. Look for the exposed areas to see surf in the waist-chest high range…while the standouts, biggest in South San Diego, see some chest-shoulder high sets…as this swell peaks. The better combo breaks, that will still have a bit of leftover S swell, could see some fun shape as this swell mixes in.

Hopefully this storm will strengthen more over the next day or so…just so we can see some more size…but even if it doesn’t it is still nice to see some NPAC action. There might even be another little NPAC spinner brewing up over the Aleutians…