What variables go into it and how accurate can it be, even days in advance?
In: Other
Some parts of what affects waves are very predictable, long in advance. For example the tides are very well understood and can play a huge role in water heights and wave activity.
Some of the other factors are less predictable, but still things we can observe and forecast with reasonable accuracy pretty far out. The weather and major storms being the obvious example here. We can’t predict with 100% accuracy when/where rain will fall, but we can observe current wind flows and have developed computer models that give a rough but usually pretty good forecast for the subsequent few days.
Combine that with comparing current conditions and predicted conditions to historical data and it’s usually possible to make decent predictions about potential wave conditions.
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