HOW TO USE (BUT NOT ABUSE) LOLA
By Sean Collins and Steve Hawk
Copyright Surfline 2001 All rights Reserved.

Intro • Buoy Observations • Five Day Forecasts • Swell Tracking Maps

Clicking on the "LOLA" logo with the pretty red lips will always return you to the LOLA home page. The big pretty map in the middle shows current wave heights around the world.

All times are in Greenwich mean time (GMT), which is five hours ahead of New York and eight hours ahead of Los Angeles standard times. All size measurements are in feet. If you're married to the metric system, convert using 3.28 feet per meter.
 
To see a looping sequence of how wave heights will progress over the next 120 hours (five days), click on the word "Loop" in the upper right-hand corner of the page. To freeze the map at any point in the future, click on one of the numbers to the left of the word "Loop". If
you click on the number 48, for instance, the map shows predicted wave heights two days from today. Once you've stopped that clock at a future date, you can toggle back and forth between "Wave Heights" and "Peak Periods" for that particular point in time.

When you first land on LOLA, the map displays wave heights. Click on "Peak Periods" (under the "What" heading) and the map will show wave periods only, regardless of height. (More on the "Peak Periods" page below.)

To zoom in on one of five regional maps, or to return to the global map, click on one of the six boxes under the "Where" heading -- for example, "N. Atlantic", "N. Pacific". You can also get to the regional maps by clicking on the corresponding area on the global map.

To filter out all short-period swells from the wave-height map, click on one of the three boxes under the "How" heading.
 
1)
 T :16 filters out all wave energy except serious ground swells -- those with a period of 16 seconds or greater. This is a good tool to use if you want to see when the leading edge of a solid swell will arrive in your area.
2)
 T :13 filters out all wave periods below 13 seconds. This tool tells you when the meat of the swell will arrive.
3)
 T :10 filters out sea-surface "noise" -- e.g. swells with a period of nine seconds
or less. This gets rid of localized wind swells, which rarely travel more than a few hundred miles and often befog long-term forecasting.

HOME PAGE :"Peak Periods" shows only wave periods, with no regard to their size. This is a good tool for detecting small long-period swells (T > 20 or T > 14) that might be relatively invisible on maps that display only wave heights. In Southern California,
for instance, a solid 4-foot, 20-second ground swell out of the south might not be readily apparent on the "Wave Heights" page if there's a lot of northwest wind swell on the water. But, while the NW wind swell won't produce much surf, that "inconspicuous" southern ground swell can translate to double- to triple-overhead waves at good deep-water breaks.

Intro • Buoy Observations • Five Day Forecasts • Swell Tracking Maps