"
Coastal Waters Forecast for New South Wales
Hunter Coast: Seal Rocks to Broken Bay Issued at 4:07 pm EDT on Monday 1 November 2010
for the period until midnight EDT Thursday 4 November 2010.
Forecast for Monday until midnight

Winds: Northeasterly 15 to 25 knots tending northwesterly 20 to 30 knots later in the evening. Seas: 1 to 1.5 metres increasing to 1.5 to 2 metres later in the evening. Swell: Easterly 2 metres. Scattered thunderstorms, mainly offshore"

this here post was put up at 5 .34 mon .It is pissing down rain and has been blowing pretty much from the south since around 8 .30 am in Newcastle which is the main city in the area they describe .
Did anyone at the BOM think to check what the wind had been doing since 8.30 am .It seems not as you can see from the updated forcast this arvo .

This post may seem pretty petty but this is also from the guys who I emailed a couple of months ago re Thredbo weather station wind readings being grossly incorrect ,by around 80% eg storm winds when I was there in Sept blowing well over 80 km/h station said 25 km/h,this is what it was like all season apparently(and potentially dangerous as a result for backcountry tourers and operators of ski lifts that tend to swing around wildly in high wind and can derail ).They thanked me for the heads up and nothing has changed it seems .These are also the guys who didn't see the pasher bulker storm coming until only a few hours out when every other forecaster (including amatuer forecasters who read the long range forecast maps that THE BOM and others produce and were all lining up at least 3 days out as the same ) .Don't aeroplanes and air traffic controllers decide which direction the planes are going to take off and land according to these forecasts or are they privvy to more accurate forecasts where someone goes outside and goes "jeez fellas its blowin south out here ,i reckon we orta change the forcast eh,crikey look at that it's been doin it for the last 8 hrs too " der !!
What have they been doing all day ???????? don't these people have science degrees and get paid pretty well to give accurate forecasts ???

OK so here is the amatuer forecaster in me giving a defence for them .It seems from the radar tracking and the way the cloud in the upper atmosphere (and picked up by the IR sattelite ) that the winds higher have been coming from the NW .It seems a sneaky surface front snuck up the coast under all that through the day .that is still no excuse for the updated forecast issued this arvo that didn't seem to notice the winds right along the coast that had been blowing from the S all day .

It's not just NSW, victoria had a forcasat yesterday for extremely strong southwesterlys at 20-30knts then reaching 35knts for the arvo

Ended up blowing westerly most of the day at about 15knts untill about 6pm where it changed to SW and dropped to about 5knts

My forecast is easy. Windy 9am to 5pm weekdays, calm all other times.
(I wagged work on friday and had a short sess. don't tell anyone.)

colinwill78 said...

My forecast is easy. Windy 9am to 5pm weekdays, calm all other times.
(I wagged work on friday and had a short sess. don't tell anyone.)

whered did u get that from BOM is local in Melbourne yet they struggle to get our forcasts right 80% of the time

well well .It went around to the NW .they just didn't factor (or notice ) the shallow surface change throughout the day .
A dark art, at times, this forecasting

Mr float said...

bennie said...

port macquarie north had ne wins all day. So somwhere between port and newie was where the direction changed. I had noticed yesterday that the forcast was south for sydney, and ne for newie. I thought that strange at the time, but it turns out they weren't that far wrong.

they were VERY wrong for the best part of the day for 'newie" (point of order and sorry to sound like a sad sack BTW but most people here still call Newcastle... Newcastle , Newie is what locals call Newcastle beach ,the one in front of where the "Royal" hospital used to be . Calling Newcastle "newie " gets under most local's skin .Oh and I'm not originally from here,my wife is , it's what the locals have pointed out to me in general discussion about nick names for the area )
Also "pOrty " now has it's own category as the "Macquarie Coast ..Smoky Cape to Seal rocks (or seals rocks as I have heard it often called, just north of "Nelson's bay " ) which is a good idea .The old coastal forecast area was just too massive and comes under too many local influences,they got something right at least . The Hunter Valley itself has a massive effect on local weather with NW winds funneling down the valley often keeping out coastal winds such as today's southerly which prevailed and no one at the BOm seemed to notice (which might explain why they forecast NW even this arvo when it was blowing S . Also many NE winds here in Newcastle just don't happen when it is blowing 20 kts NE just up the road at Pt Stephens or just down the road south at Norah ("Nory") Head .Can be bloody frustrating )

Lucky I don't come from "newie" sorry newcastle then

The following observation came from nelson bay, only 40 km from nobbys head. weather forcasting isn't an exact science, and the BOM did get newcastles forecast wrong, but geeze cut them some slack, they were out by less than 40 kms. I reckon it's pretty impressive to be able to predict 2 completely opposing wind directions within a relatively small area of coast. Don't forget that southerly pushed all the way up from the victorian border.

Latest Weather Observations for Nelson Bay

Issued at 11:35 pm EDT Monday 1 November 2010 (issued every 30 minutes, with the page automatically refreshed every 10 minutes)

Station Details ID: 061054 Name: NELSON BAY (NELSON HEAD) Lat: -32.71 Lon: 152.16 Height: 25.0 m
Data from the previous 72 hours. | See also: Recent months at Nelson Bay
Date/Time

Dir Speed Gust Speed Gust
°C °C °C % °C km/h knots hPa hPa mm
01/03:00pm 19.2 20.3 17.2 88 1.2 ENE 7 - 4 - - - 2.0
01/09:00am 20.2 22.6 19.6 96 0.4 NE 6 - 3 - - - 16.0