Best site for sea state forecasts along the south cost?

[wipe_out]

As the title says I am interested in the best site for forecasting sea state along the south coast.. I am planning to move the boat from Little Hampton to Poole on Saturday and need to watch and see how the weather and water develops over the next few days to know if it's going to happen or not..

Thanks

 

[jac]

Try windguru. Designed for windsurfers where wave height is fairly important

 

[Aeolus]

I find this site pretty good http://www.passageweather.com

 

[wipe_out]

Thanks.. Both look very useful..

 

[oldvarnish]

all these sites use the same raw data - GFS

 

[FairweatherDave]

magicseaweed.com is the surfers forecast site, not that you'll be that close in shore .... but still might be useful beyond the met office/bbc stuff

 

[jdc]

As the title says I am interested in the best site for forecasting sea state along the south coast.. I am planning to move the boat from Little Hampton to Poole on Saturday and need to watch and see how the weather and water develops over the next few days to know if it's going to happen or not...

What are you moving? A rowing VIII or a canal barge maybe? If not, apart from leaving Littlehampton and crossing the associated offshore bar, why is it a consideration?

The only thing that counts is wind (ok, visibility I suppose as well, but only if thick fog is likely - and it's not this coming w/e). According to www.bbc.co.uk/weather (as good as any), it's going to be a SE F5 on Friday, decreasing over night and moving to S 3-4 on Saturday and then SSW by Sunday. Perfect I'd have thought.

In any case web sites won't help with the purely local conditions of the Littlehampton entrance as they cover areas of 50km or more across, but if you really want a sea state forecast which takes no account of shelter, headlands, shallows or tide races, a GRIB file viewer like ZyGrib will let you display the GFS model's predictions.

PS: the sea state, as reported by the Inshore Forecast will be 'Slight or Moderate' all weekend, or I'll eat my hat.

 

[jakeroyd]

try
http://www.weatheronline.co.uk/mari...&CEL=C&SI=mph&MENU=0&MEER=grbr&MODELLTYP=pslv

This also uses GFS but has a gustometer and a wave heioght estimator etc.
You can select the area you need.

 

[jdc]

GFS wave height estimator

I'm not trying to rubbish the American GFS forecasts - I use them all the time for offshore sailing although I download them and then use a viewer (ZyGrib, but any will do I guess) rather than a web site.

But their adaptation to local conditions, eg the Solent, is dubious. To illustrate this, here is the a graphic of the GRIB file for the UK for Saturday, with interpolation off, so it shows the actual data. The whole UK one is from weatheronline's site, the zoomed in one is the raw GFS data displayed on ZyGrib. Note the size of each pixel compared to a tiny feature like the Isle of Wight, and how the model takes no notice of it!

Hence I really think that the standard met office inshore forecast will be give the best answer for the OP as the raw weather model is interpreted by a human, allowing for local topology. But perhaps a PM to Frank Singleton would get a more authoritative view.

PS. We should all praise the Americans for releasing the output of their global weather model. Our own, tax-payer funded, UK and European models are to finer scale and reportedly slightly more accurate, but the output is kept secret from us. I can't even buy it on a subscription basis - grr.

 

[Modulation]

Although all the sites use the same data the presentation on windfinder (if you download their app) is easy to use. You can also get the coastal (NOT the inshore waters) forecasts from the BBC. These cover smaller areas than inshore waters and I have found to be generall more accurate.

 

[RUSSH]

Don't forget local National Coastwatch Institution stations if there's one in the areas you are interested in. Just give them a call and they'll give you an eyes on real time update. Some have web cams and real time weather instruments on line you can view. They provide a great volunteer service worthy of our support. http://www.nci.org.uk/content/stations