Weather Forecasts

General

As we've mentioned elsewhere, Atlanta area windsurfers tend to become students of the weather. Since we don't have any particular geography (e.g. ocean, desert) to drive wind on a regular or daily basis, we depend upon weather systems. Systems vary in occurrence and magnitude- a fancy way of saying: when it blows and how hard it blows isn't something you can anticipate or expect very far into the future.

If you go some place like Cape Hatteras for a week in season, you can generally anticipate getting anywhere from four to six days of wind. For windsurfers, Florida in the spring and San Francisco in the summer deliver wind almost on a daily basis.

We don't have that luxury. To plan our outings, we look to weather forecasts. To confirm the forecasts (forecasts can be wrong), we depend on certain indicators to tell us the likely or actual conditions on the water.

Forecasts

It bears remembering that predicting weather is one of the most difficult scientific computational problems. Some of our nation's most powerful computers are used in weather prediction.