Who writes this, and how it is checked
lasaladita.com is a field guide to the weather, surf and wildlife of one stretch of the Guerrero coast. It is written and run by one person, it sells nothing, and every number on it can be traced to a public dataset or to a measurement made here.
Who writes this
Addie Conner writes and edits the site. Her working background is in experimental design and data feedback loops for marketing and operations: leading indicators, incremental lift, contribution analysis, and the habit of asking whether a measured effect survives a second test. That habit is the editorial policy here.
She surfs La Saladita, mostly on a longboard. The surf engine on this site is calibrated against her own in-water ratings, which is both its strength (the scores mean something at this break) and its known limit (one observer, one board preference).
She also publishes longboardsurfing.org, boutiquesurfhotels.com and templosaladita.com, and writes at addieconner1.substack.com.
How the site treats evidence
- Findings run through an ensemble of methods. Each analysis in Findings is tested with several independent statistical approaches (trend tests, change-point tests, permutation, rolling windows, and where the record allows a satellite-era retest). A result ships only when the methods agree. When they later disagree, the walk-back is published too: EPAC regime change is a 5-of-5 result that the satellite-era retest overturned, kept on the site as a worked example.
- The forecast is scored, not just published. The surf engine's calls are logged next to what was actually seen in the water, and the gap is reported on the skill audit with confidence intervals wide enough to say so when the sample is too small. The methodology page states the cross-validated accuracy of the classifier rather than a rounded-up one.
- No score without observations. Nearby breaks get raw open-coast data and a geographic note, and no 1-to-10 quality score, until at least ten observations exist for that spot.
- Base rates are labelled as base rates. Seasonal and climate context is presented against the local climatology, with the data window stated (47 to 77 years depending on the signal).
- Data rights. The site is built on public datasets (NOAA, ERA5, HURDAT2, NHC, USGS, GEBCO, GBIF, iNaturalist, OBIS and others listed on each page). Original text, analyses and the data API are free to use with attribution to lasaladita.com. Species photos belong to their iNaturalist observers under the licence shown on each page, and upstream credits carried in the API responses must be kept.
What is measured here
data/ground_truth/observations.jsonl) record date, spot, face height, shape, wind, what was rideable and a 1-to-10 quality call, alongside the engine's snapshot for the same day. A forecast ledger keeps each served forecast so it can be scored after the day has happened.Sister sites
The same author publishes longboardsurfing.org, boutiquesurfhotels.com and templosaladita.com. They are listed here so the connection is on the record; none of them feeds rankings or recommendations into this site. lasaladita.com carries no directory, no hotel or restaurant ranking and no endorsements.
How to cite
Cite the site as La Saladita Field Guide, lasaladita.com, with a link. Cite a specific analysis by its own URL (for example lasaladita.com/findings/intensity-widening/) together with the underlying data source listed in that page's methodology footer. Cite today's surf as La Saladita Forecast, lasaladita.com/forecast. The author is Addie Conner. New findings and field notes are announced in the RSS feed.
Contact
Corrections, observations from the water, and questions about the data: [email protected].
Cite as: “About”, La Saladita Field Guide, lasaladita.com/about/, updated 2026-09-26.