Little boy, she's gonna make you a man...

What is she? What does she do?

Remember HAL, the rebellious computer on the spaceship in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey? Well, LOLA is HAL's sexy sister. While HAL spun through space, LOLA explored Earth and its oceans. Specifically, she is obsessed with waves: how they're generated, where they're coming from, where they're going and how big they're going to be. As surfers, we are very aware of the oceans' magic. LOLA is here to help us harness that magic.

LOLA is a combination of many things. She's a computer model that crunches data under the Wavewatch III model algorithms. By using empirical evidence gained from more than 30 years of surf forecasting, LOLA tweaks the Wavewatch III data. She gathers real-time data from offshore buoys to measure wave pulses from storms around the world every hour. She taps into orbiting satellites to measure hurricane-force winds and tremendous wave heights in the heart of raging storms when huge ships are running for cover. She computes near-shore wave animations measuring detailed wave heights along the coast, taking into account how swells are distorted by offshore islands and the continental shelf. LOLA creates detailed weather charts for surfers who want to figure it out for themselves. And she will become whatever else we want her to be as we use her to score more waves, more often.

LOLA gives us a look into much of the same information, but from different views. Initially, we created LOLA as a proprietary tool for Surfline forecasters. But we decided to share the knowledge and give our Surfline.com users the chance to use LOLA themselves. You can use LOLA very simply, or you can use her as complexly as we do at Surfline. It all depends on how deep you want to go. It's your choice. And hopefully the following tutorial will help you achieve what we are all after: being at the right place, at the right time...