Yesterday, Wednesday 6th, our team deployed the complete Spoondrift wave array (18 moorings). We used a local charter out of Avila Beach, CA, and had excellent conditions, (practically no waves or wind), which made the work easy and efficient.  The array covers the region from just north of Avila beach (about 1 mile west of Diablo Canyon power plant), to about 10 miles south of Pt Sal. The header picture shows a Spotter in the water, west of Pt Sal.

The main instrumentation on the wave moorings are Spoondrift Spotters, solar-powered wave trackers that measure surface displacements and transmit wave data (see figure above on left, for scale). The Spotters are deployed using a lightweight inverse catenary mooring with two small secondary surface floats and weighted lines to minimize surface signature. We have updated the shared google sheet and map to reflect actual coordinates of the instruments.

Live updates from the Spotter array are available through the Inner Shelf Spotter Dashboard (see above figure). The Dashboard also includes model overlays (see above), bulk time series, and direct comparison between model and data (see figure below).

All model data currently on the site is based on a regional SWAN model with WaveWatch boundary conditions (our ‘FirstGuess’). We are currently porting real-time updates from a back-ray assimilation model to the site. These assimilation model data will also be available through the Dashboard next week (we will update when available).