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Bigsalty Posts > Bigsalty Help > Website help

Website help

We've compiled a list of useful suggestions to make the most out of the Bigsalty Weather Service.

Bigsalty Desktop

You can get help within the docs section of Bigsalty Weather, or ask a question in the forum, or give us a shout on social media.

To help you to make the most of Big Salty Weather, we’ve put together a list of suggestions of how best to use the site.

  1. Using the wave buoy data
  2. Beaufort scale colouring
  3. The Watchlist
  4. Automatic login

Wave Buoy [User Tip]


Visit the Home Page and click on the ‘Current Wave’ tab in the current weather panel to view recent swell data around the UK and Ireland.

Roll over the Buoys to view precise swell period, height and reading time. Click on the Buoys to view a graph of the variance of swell, period and wind speed over the past several hours.

A recent history of swell period and height readings are useful because from the Buoy’s positions, depending on the energy of the swell, the time it takes to get to the beach will be a few hours. Therefore the swell you see at the beach will have the characteristics of the swell seen a few hours ago on the chart rather than the current swell.

Beaufort Scale [User Tip]

To keep things consistent across the site we keep the colour shadings the same for the Beaufort Scale on the wind maps and the 7 day forecast pages.

This should help ‘at a glance’ digestion of the forecast so that you can trace down the 7 day forecast and see the Beaufort Scale of the coming wind with ease.

The Beaufort Scale defines categories of wind strength and is the standard for all marine and land observations. The wind strength categories are displayed below.

Beaufort ForceWind Speed KnotsDescriptionSea Condition
0
0 Calm Sea like a mirror
1
1 - 3 Light air Ripples but without foam crests
2
4 - 6 Light breeze Small wavelets. Crests do not break
3
7 - 10 Gentle breeze Large wavelets. Perhaps scattered white horses
4
11 - 16 Moderate breeze Small waves. Fairly frequent white horses
5
17 - 21 Fresh breeze Moderate waves. Many white horses
6
22 - 27 Strong breeze Large waves begin to form; white foam crests. Probably spray
7
28 - 33 Near gale Sea heaps up and white foam blown in streaks along the direction of the wind
8
34 - 40 Gale Moderately high waves. Crests begin to break into spindrift. The foam is blown in well marked streaks along the direction of the wind
9
41 - 47 Severe gale High waves. Dense foam along the direction of the wind. Crests of waves begin to roll over. Spray may affect visibility
10
48 - 55 Storm Very high waves with long overhanging crests. The surface of the sea takes a white appearance. The tumbling of the sea becomes heavy and shock-like. Visibility affected
11
56 - 63 Violent storm Exceptionally high waves. The sea is completely covered with long white patches of foam lying in the direction of the wind. Visibility affected
12
64+ Hurricane The air is filled with foam and spray. Sea completely white with driving spray. Visibility very seriously affected

The Watchlist [User Tip]


So that you have your most frequented locations one click away wherever you are on the website, we have the Big Salty Watchlist. The Watchlist charts also display a summary of the wind ratings at each of your 6 available locations.

To set up your Watchlist visit the Help & Settings section, select ‘Watchlist’ and simply select your locations from the available locations list.

Automatic log in [User Tip]


Once you have registered as a new user, the system remembers you each time you visit Big Salty unless you specifically log out. With this, you can benefit from automatically viewing your Watchlist, your chosen wind and wave height units and even centralise the home page wather map on your region automatically whenever you visit the site.

This automatic customisation should hopefully make it much easier to make the most of the website and enjoy one click access to each of your watchlist 7 day forecasts. You can benefit as a Big salty Weather user by clicking here.

Bigsalty Help

Posted: Thu 5 May, 2016
by admin

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