Your Favorite Wave Height Fcst Website is CHANGING !!

[Johnoly]

{Apologies for the duplicate FL & CA posts, but there is no singular USA section and this affects both coasts}


If you think Windfinder / Magic Seaweed / Surfline / Wunderground / etc, / etc does wave height forecasts without the numbers from NOAA, then you don't know who owns the millions of dollars in satellites, buoy's, and super fast computers to crunch that mountain of data. They all get info from NOAA to publish their websites.

Since last week NOAA has been converting and changing the wave model database. This is the same database that all the popular websites use to publish their own forecasts. On Tuesday NOAA announced the new changes. They have discontinued the previous " Global Wave Ensemble System (GWES) ". This is the raw database websites forecast waves from.

They now revamped everything and the new database is called " GEFSv12 ". The biggest change beside increased forecasting accuracy is that now all your favorite WAVE websites will be going from 10 days up to 16 days. In backwards testing, they are achieving 98% accuracy 36hrs out and 60% accuracy at 16 days out which is really good. But it's going to take all the websites a few weeks to update their software to see all the new fields in the new database. Even NOAA's sites are not up yet and they will be one of the first to come on line. When you see your favorite website go to a full 16 days, you'll know they are finally using the newest GEFSv12 database info from NOAA with greater accuracy. Keep a lookout for the change on your favorite wave height forecast website !!

 

[Divin'Papaw]

{Apologies for the duplicate FL & CA posts, but there is no singular USA section and this affects both coasts}


If you think Windwinder / Magic Seaweed / Surfline / Wunderground / etc, / etc does wave height forecasts without the numbers from NOAA, then you don't know who owns the millions of dollars in satellites, buoy's, and super fast computers to crunch that mountain of data. They all get info from NOAA to publish their websites.

Since last week NOAA has been converting and changing the wave model database. This is the same database that all the popular websites use to publish their own forecasts. On Tuesday NOAA announced the new changes. They have discontinued the previous " Global Wave Ensemble System (GWES) ". This is the raw database websites forecast waves from.

They now revamped everything and the new database is called " GEFSv12 ". The biggest change beside increased forecasting accuracy is that now all your favorite WAVE websites will be going from 10 days up to 16 days. In backwards testing, they are achieving 98% accuracy 36hrs out and 60% accuracy at 16 days out which is really good. But it's going to take all the websites a few weeks to update their software to see all the new fields in the new database. Even NOAA's sites are not up yet and they will be one of the first to come on line. When you see your favorite website go to a full 16 days, you'll know they are finally using the newest GEFSv12 database info from NOAA with greater accuracy. Keep a lookout for the change on your favorite wave height forecast website !!

Sweet news!!! Thx for sharing @Johnoly

I've noticed that Windy no longer shows wave height forecasts and I assume this is why. They clearly haven't yet implemented the new data source from NOAA.

 

[PoolsOpen]

@Johnoly ,

Thanks for the info..
U the man!!!

 

[Akimbo]

@Johnoly

Do you have any idea what software these sites use to display the NOAA data? Hopefully they have been working on the GEFSv12 upgrade.

 

[Johnoly]

@Johnoly

Do you have any idea what software these sites use to display the NOAA data? Hopefully they have been working on the GEFSv12 upgrade.

This NOAA GEFSv12 is just the raw data. Like all relational databases it is a primary key linked-multiple database system. Depending on what information you want to format and present is where and how many of these relational databases you will open and link together based on the primary key(s).

In layman's terms>NOAA just does the hardest work and crunches the algorithyms, spits out a flat sheet of paper with a ton of numbers on it line by line. The websites like Magic Seaweed goes in and grabs this sheet of paper and re-formats it into pretty little graphs, charts and columns that make it easy for a diver to read. Magic Seaweed isn't the engine, they are just the wax and shine to make it look pretty and readable. NOAA is the engine and they just installed a huge V8 monster upgrade.

But to "directly" answer your question...........As said above it's not software, it's raw data of numbers(the engine). Here is just one database out of many of the new GEFSv12 wave forecast system.
ftp://ftpprd.ncep.noaa.gov/pub/data/nccf/com/gens/prod/gefs.20200930/12/wave/station/