Introducing The N. Pacific Forecast Model Page

I put my geek skills to use and created a page that shows the next week's forecast models via easy to see and animated images. See http://jaminjones.blogspot.com/p/npm.html (and you can also access this from my side bar "stuff be here" sub menu). I've been working on this for a while and it should be ready for general use, though I still have a few tweaks to add here and there.

These forecast model images have always been available from other servers (www.fnmoc.navy.mil) but I thought I could improve the presentation a bit.  I'm also showing only the images that I believe are most relevant to Maui and west coast water enthusiasts - such as surface pressure and precipitation.  I also have the swell height and direction as separate images.  From these you can get a pretty good idea as to the trend for the next week's weather.  For instance I use the pressure gradient lines as a guide to upcoming wind direction, strength, swell fetch, and storm or high pressure intensity, etc.  I'm hoping other weather geeks find this mildly useful or possibly entertaining.

Keep in mind this is only a prediction/guess and as these maps go further out in time the forecast becomes less certain.  Judging from the maps I'm looking at today (Nov 26), I'd say starting Sunday or so we might have a long stretch of no wind.  Looks like a low pressure system is spinning up fairly close and north of the islands around Friday.  Be interesting to see if this comes about.

So feel free to link and or visit this page often.  Each time the page is refreshed (just click on the title or reload) the latest model images will be grabbed.  I'm going to add a more obvious refresh link somewhere on the page to just update the images, and I might make this an automatic process so you can stay on the page and always have the latest model images.  Let me know what you think via comments.  Aloha - Jamin