SURF CLIMATE AT THREE SELECTED U. S. COASTAL LOCALES - ATLANTIC CITY, 

 NEW JERSEY; HILLSBORO INLET, FLORIDA; YAQUINA BAY, OREGON 



by 



Johnny A. Hall 

 Beach Erosion Board 



INTRODUCTION 



A program of visual surf observation to provide fundamental informa- 

 tion on surf characteristics along the coasts of the United States was 

 initiated on a cooperative basis between the Beach Erosion Board and the 

 United States Coast Guard in April 1954. This project has been designated 

 as the Cooperative Wave Observation Program (CWOP). Originally observa- 

 tions were made at 27 stations, but the number of stations has now been 

 reduced to 18 for various reasons. The locations of the stations, both 

 the active and the inactive, are shown on Figure 1. 



OBSERVATION AND COLLECTION OF DATA 



Each Coast Guard Station participating in the CWOP makes visual ob- 

 servations every 4 hours unless adequate observation is prevented by poor 

 visibility. The information is recorded on a standarized form and consists 

 of the following: a) breaker period in seconds, b) significant breaker 

 height to nearest one-half foot, c) direction from which wave approaches 

 before breaking, d) the type (spilling, plunging or surging) of breakers 

 formed, and e) any unusual meteorological or oceanological conditions such 

 as strong winds, abnormal tides, etc. The tabulated data are mailed weekly 

 to the Beach Erosion Board. While realizing that data such as this should 

 be ideally collected with a precision beyond the capabilities of human ob- 

 servers, it is felt by those associated with the program that errors in the 

 collected data are not excessive and are statistically compensated over a 

 few months of observations. 



AUTOMATIC DATA PROCESSING 



The difficulty of manually transforming the great mass of data thus 

 collected into useful statistical summaries became apparent during the 

 preparation of Beach Erosion Board Technical Memorandum No. 108, Surf 

 Statistics for the Coasts of the United States , dated November 1958. 

 Compilation of the statistical tables for that memorandum from CWOP data 

 took approximately one man-year. To efficiently expedite the reduction of 

 the CWOP information, consideration was given to Automatic Data Processing 

 (ADP) by machine. Data was selected from three stations - Atlantic City 

 Lifeboat Station, Atlantic City, New Jersey; Hillsboro Inlet Light Station, 

 Pompano Beach, Florida; and Yaquina Bay Lifeboat Station, Newport, Oregon - 



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