Models Say Gail...Who?

Looks like San Diego is going to be a little windy this weekend....along with some waves. The grib below show a lot of wind from the north on Saturday. See the pink arrows near the socal coast? They have multiple barbs and are pointing south. Wind will blow from north to south.

The map below is a 48 hour 500 mb chart from NOAA. This is a copy of the same file broadcasted to ships via shortwave radio. Basically the chart shows what the jet stream in the upper atmosphere will be doing on Saturday. The thick line shows the "trough" moving from east to west. Notice how the lines are uniform and relatively straight...the upper atmosphere is moving...wind but no rain. The "H 591" represents a high that is helping to keeping so cal sunny and warm.

The chart below is the 48 hour surface chart from NOAA. Basically this is a hand drawn version of the automated color computer model above. This chart shows the weather on the surface of the earth. You can see the same high mentioned above. You can also see a wind arrow with multiple barbs near socal. The cool thing about NOAA charts is that a human includes symbols to help us understand whats going on. In this case they wrote the word "gail" near socal.


What does "gail" mean? You could nerd out and read this but to make life easy I copy/pasted an exerpt below...

Gail refers to an extratropical low or an area of sustained surface winds (averaged over a ten minute period, momentary gusts may be higher) of 34 knots (39 mph) to 47 knots (54 mph).

A gail is half way beween what weather forcasters call a developing storm and a storm. So what do the surf forcast websites say about this? Below is an excerpt from WetSand:


"Models today show a much more impressive wind swell fetch forming off the California coast by the weekend. This is from a low that is just now kicking up some 20' seas in the Gulf of Alaska. This will throw some minor NW ground swell our way, but the dominant portion of swell is looking to come from wind swell that'd get kicked up by this system once the low positions itself closer to our area this weekend."

When surf forecaster refers to models, they are talking about the grib files and charts displayed above. My goal is to develop accurate surf forecasts on my own by using the same models they use. It takes longer than just reading a surf forcast but who said a hobby should be about saving time?