Buoy 46131 is moored at Sentry Shoal at 49.910°N, 124.980°W, and is operated by Environment and Climate Change Canada. It reports hourly and measures wind speed and direction, gusts, wave height and period, barometric pressure, and air and sea temperature. This page shows what it measured, and — the part no buoy feed publishes — how far the forecast model was from it at the same hour.
| Wind | 5.1 kts from the NNW (343°) |
|---|---|
| Gusts | 6.6 kts |
| Wave height | 0.1 m at 2 s |
| Pressure | 1022.8 hPa |
| Air temperature | 15.7 °C |
| Sea temperature | 15.0 °C |
For that same hour the forecast model gave 4.7 kts at this position, against the 5.1 kts the buoy recorded — the model was 0.4 kts low. One hour is an anecdote, not a verdict; the record below is the one to read.
Over the last 1 day, the 24-hour forecast for this buoy under-forecast the wind by 2.0 kts on average, and was off by 2.5 kts either way. That is 21 checked predictions.
Forecast skill cannot be read off a model’s own past hours, because those come from a run that has already absorbed the observations and so flatter it. The only honest way is to write the prediction down before the weather happens and score it afterwards, which is what these numbers are. A prediction is recorded once and never revised.
These 6 locations show Sentry Shoal’s readings as their measured conditions. Each binding was checked by hand rather than taken from whichever buoy is nearest — wind and waves do not carry across an island, and eight of the 57 locations have no buoy in reach at all.
This buoy is not operated by this site. It belongs to Environment and Climate Change Canada, and its data is distributed by the NDBC station feed, though the readings above come straight from ECCC's own datamart, which publishes them about an hour before they reach NDBC and without NDBC's rounding of wind to whole metres per second. These are real-time observations with automated quality control only, not the reviewed archive, and readings change hourly — the figures above were generated when this page was requested.
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