OCEAN CITY — The Ocean City Beach Patrol this week was honored for its nearly two decades of providing invaluable rip current forecasting models used by the National Weather Service to get warnings and other information out to communities up and down the east coast and beyond.
At the start of Monday’s Mayor and Council meeting, the National Weather Service (NWS) information technology officer and rip current program coordinator, Scott Schumann, presented Ocean City Beach Patrol Captain Butch Arbin and his staff with a special recognition of the department’s groundbreaking work in rip current research and forecasting. The OCBP was the first beach patrol to determine how best to forecast dangerous rip currents and disseminate the information to residents and visitors to Ocean City’s beaches.
Over the years, the OCBP has supplied rip current forecasting information to the National Weather Service’s office in Wakefield, Va. and that information is shared in coastal communities up and down the east coast and beyond, according to Schumann.
“This has been going on for 18 years,” he said. “The National Weather Service has been coordinating its rip current forecasts with the Ocean City Beach Patrol for that long. It has evolved from a fax to email to now an online form.”
Schumann praised Arbin and his crews for their groundbreaking rip current forecasting work, which is utilized by other beach patrol agencies throughout the mid-Atlantic region.
“Butch has been beyond valuable in educating our forecasters,” he said. “Our station in Wakefield covers an area from Fenwick Island to Corolla, N.C. and includes three states and six beach patrols and Ocean City by far is the most organized, the most accurate and the most willing to get the message out to the community. It really is the model for predicting rip currents and has been copied all over the world.”
For his part, Arbin said the OCBP’s primary mission is to watch the ocean and guard the beaches in Ocean City, but its scientific research on predicting rip currents goes far beyond the city’s borders.
“The one thing about Ocean City’s Beach Patrol is we’re not just lifeguards,” he said. “What we do here affects the people not only in this community but the east coast and around the world. We work with the National Weather Service to help them come up with the same types of models they use for predicting hurricanes and having a way to get the word out to people about the dangers of rip currents. We work with the National Weather Service and agencies all over the world. We’ve been part of the scientific research as well as the boots on the beach making rescues.”
