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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Saturday, November 9, 2002

Local surf forecast Web page to return

By Karen Blakeman
Advertiser Staff Writer

Surfers aghast at the shutdown of Pat Caldwell's surf forecast Web page can take heart: Caldwell will be back online Friday, working in collaboration with the National Weather Service.

There will be no local-style reporting of wave heights on the new page.

Caldwell, the Pacific Liaison Officer for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Coastal Development Center, until recently produced one of the most popular surf information sites in the state. His predictions for when and where the surf would hit and how big it would be were routine reading among those obsessed with the sport.

But last week the NOAA shut Caldwell down, leaving a message that said the site was terminated for safety reasons.

The problem, officials said, was that although Caldwell gave his predicted wave heights in the nationally approved manner of estimating the wave face from crest to trough, he also provided a conversion to local-style estimates, a figure of about half the size.

Jim Weyman of the National Weather Service, another agency that falls under NOAA, said that the public needs a consistent reading of wave height. Two standards within NOAA were bad enough, he said, but some private surf sites use a third measure that is larger than Caldwell's local reading but smaller than the national scale.

Tourists and others less familiar with the dangers of the ocean could walk into surf they were told was 3 feet high, only to be injured by a 6-foot wave, Weyman said.

Surfers said Caldwell, whether he reported in two scales or one, came the closest to reality. They wrote e-mails by the hundreds to NOAA, to the National Weather Service, to the city and county lifeguards and to state news agencies, protesting the closing of Caldwell's page. The government officials took note.

Weyman announced yesterday that a new online forecast was developed by a committee of experts.

It will be launched at 2 p.m. Friday, at www.prh.noaa.gov/hnl/pages/marine.html.

The site will be updated three times each weekday, except federal holidays. A daily version is expected in the future, as are detailed Neighbor Island forecasts.

Caldwell will write a discussion section for the 2 p.m. report. National Weather Service forecasters will update the information at 6 p.m. to provide an abbreviated version of the report at 8 a.m.

In addition to Caldwell's comments, the site will include general expected wave heights for O'ahu's north, south, east and west shores, provided in the nationally approved wave measurement style: the face of the wave from crest to trough.

"If they are determined to go local," Caldwell said, "they can take the general and divide by two."

The page will also include a chart that provides nine different extremely technical surf and wind indicators: swell height, dominant direction, dominant period, shoaling factor, height tendency, probability, wind speed, wind direction and speed tendency.

Caldwell said that for the North Shore, depending upon the period, the swell height column will be very close to local surfer scale, and he thinks surfers will find it useful.

"I used to give face plus local," Caldwell said after the announcement. "Now, we'll have open-ocean swell. Before, I didn't give period. So that's added value.

"I think community will learn to accept the compromise that has been made."

North Shore lifeguards deflected official comment on the controversial new site to Jim Howe, operations chief for ocean safety.

"It's wonderful, Howe said. "It finally sorts it all out scientifically, empirically. It's factual, its consistent, it's verifiable."

Other lifeguards said the best way to get wave information is to walk up to a lifeguard stand and ask.

Avid surfer Ian Yee said he wasn't too sure the new site would be useful.

"I think they're making it more complex," he said. "For people like me, who follow the surf religiously, maybe that is OK. But for the general public — the people they say they are trying to protect — I think it is confusing.

"Pat's way was straightforward. They should just leave him alone."