I am planning an offshore trip from Puget Sound to San Diego. While looking at weather data I saw that three of the four US West Coast OFFSHORE NOAA buoys are out of service. Only the northern most buoy, 315 NM west of Grays Harbor, WA has transmitted any data in the last week. The buoys west of Coos Bay, OR and San Francisco have been offline since before September 2009 and the Eureka Buoy has been offline since January 2010.

That means there is no actual weather data for 90% (900 NM) of the continental US pacific coast – about the offshore distance from Long Island to Miami.

Even many of the inshore Pacific Buoys are out of service. The Port Orford, OR and Eureka, CA buoys are only working intermittently. That means in the 450NM stretch of the US west coast from Coos Bay, OR to Pt Arena, CA; which includes the windiest and most dangerous points (north of Pt St George to south of Cape Mendocino), there is no actual weather data of any kind. That's 'kinda like having no inshore buoys anywhere between Baltimore and Beaufort, including Cape Hatteras - I have no doubts that problem would be quickly resolved.

Why can’t our government maintain six critical buoys on the US West Coast? Can I request my tax $$ be sent directly to NOAA?

Looking at US East Coast data – I do not see a similar problem. It appears that about 12 of 15 East Coast OFFSHORE buoys are online and only about 12 of 50 coastal buoys are off line

Why does the 900 mile stretch from Long Island to Miami get 15 offshore buoys while the entire US West Coast gets only four? The US west coast weather comes from the Pacific Ocean where there are no observation stations yet we have 1/4 as many buoys as the East coast where most of the weather comes from inland where there are lots of observation stations.

I am feeling so neglected out here!