Surf Forecasting
Wish you could see the future? So do we. The first night we got our iPhones, Peter decided what the world needed more than anything was a mobile surf predictor. Who could argue with such an impeccable understanding of human nature!
After a bunch of research looking for good prediction data, some math and homework, we realized that reporting the current surfing condition is fairly easy. On the other hand, predicting the future is a whole different story. Through his search for quality information, Peter came across a bunch of great public ocean data resources. If you happen to be as surf obsessed as we are and want to play the amateur oceanographer, here is a list of the sites we found with the help of our associate, Ben Porterfield.
NOAA | Storm Surf | Storm Surfing | Surfline: Pleasure Point | Buoy Weather | Wavewatch | Wetsand | Surfing Santa Cruz
www.surfline.com is very helpful
it’s funny you should bring up surfline - as a bi-monthly (tri-monthly if i’m lucky) surfer living a traffic filled hour away from the coast, surfline is a godsend. As a designer, it is the BANE OF MY EXISTENCE. It’s easily one of the most cluttered sites I’ve ever seen. Heck, I’m a regular there and it still takes me 3 minutes of staring dumbly at the home page to get over the information overload and find my way to something useful. I understand, they have a bazillion surf reports, articles, photos, etc to get out there… but for the love of all that is beautiful, narrow the number of links-per-page down to something a little more like my new kitten’s IQ and a little less like my social security number (end rant). Now, if we could tap into surfline’s utilitarian notion of custom surf reports and strap it down into a clean, easy to use iPhone design… then, then I could sleep at night (and surf in the morning on my kickass new longboard).