Bathers who found the waters of Central Florida’s Atlantic beaches too cold for swimming the past couple of weeks had a warmer alternative: The Weather Page of the Orlando Sentinel.
While the National Weather Service was reporting the water temperature at Daytona Beach at 62 degrees Aug. 1, it was 84 on The Weather Page.
That was not by design. On the contrary, it resulted from what surfers probably would term a wipeout in a rather complicated method of finding out how hot or cold the water is.
John Gregoric, a charter-boat captain in Volusia County, was one of several readers who called the newspaper to report the discrepancy, noting that the surf temperature wasn’t even close to the 80-degree range.
The water, in fact, has been unseasonably cold since mid-June, as Kevin Connolly explained in a front-page article July 24. He described a phenomenon known as upwelling, in which sustained winds push warm, surface water offshore; colder water rises from the ocean floor; and a northward flow of water, known as the Florida Current, pushes the cooler water along.
A photograph of a boy on a skim board at Daytona Beach, a thermal image of Central Florida’s Atlantic coast and an illustration of the upwelling process accompanied the article.
And, on The Weather Page, the Sentinel reported a surf temperature of 69 degrees — much cooler than the normal 80-degree reading for this time of year but consistent with the article.
The next day, however, the newspaper reported a surf temperature of 84. The next two days, it was back down to 67, then up to 81, followed by a couple of readings in the mid 70-degree range and then back up to the mid 80s. It’s enough to give a fish the sniffles.
But it wasn’t true.
Although Ron Futch, deputy chief of the Beach Patrol in Volusia County, seemed more than glad to give me the surf temperature his folks had provided to the National Weather Service, the Sentinel gets that information from a company called Weather Central in Madison, Wis.
Yup, we go to the upper Midwest to find out the temperature of the water less than an hour’s drive from the newspaper’s downtown Orlando offices. It’s all part of a package that includes other, more far-flung weather statistics.
Weather Central, by the way, gets its information by satellite from the National Weather Service, whose Central Florida station, in Melbourne, gets its information from the Beach Patrol. That may be convoluted, but you’d think it would work.
Patrick Weeden at Weather Central said, though, that his people noticed a couple of weeks ago that the surf-temperature readings were “varying by about 15 degrees” from normal. So, he said, they checked a backup source of information and “went with the one that was closer to normal.”
That backup source, the National Oceanographic Data Center, like the National Weather Service, is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But unlike the weather service, which relies on readings just offshore, the data center measures the temperature at a data buoy “20 miles east of Cape Canaveral,” where things are warmer, weather-service forecaster Matt Bragaw explained.
Weeden assured me that Weather Central would return to using National Weather Service figures. So the surf-temperature readings in The Weather Page’s Recreation Report should return to their former accuracy.
But it’s still chilly at the beach.
