The future of a regional weather service that boaters, meteorologists and even NOAA forecasters depend on is uncertain.

The state’s Ferry Weather website is the only source for information about conditions over Western Washington’s  inland waters. Covering an area stretching from the San Juan Islands south to Vashon Island that is heavily used by recreational and commercial boats, the site provides up-to-date data on wind speed and direction—and users say it’s invaluable.

“The ferry observations are probably the number one source of information to us over the water,” said Brad Colman, the meteorologist in charge of NOAA’s National Weather Service office in Seattle.

NOAA forecasters rely heavily on the Ferry Weather service to adjust forecasts when conditions are rapidly changing, Colman said. NOAA monitors weather along the coastline but has only two weather stations in Puget Sound on the water, one each at the east and west entrances of Juan de Fuca Strait.

Colman said loss of the service would significantly impact NOAA’s ability to fine-tune forecasts. “It would be a tragedy (if the service was discontinued),” he said.

The Washington State Department of Transportation planned to eliminate the service after June 30, saying the company that supplies the technology used for the service will no longer be offering it.

But in the wake of feedback from dismayed users, WSDOT has agreed to consider options for maintaining the service. Ferries communications director Marta Coursey said the department will work with the University of Washington, which administers the ferry weather service, to look at possible solutions.

“We want to make it work,” Coursey said. “We know people want it. We’re committed to doing whatever we can to keep it going.”

That’s good news to Bob Schoonmaker, who uses the Ferry Weather service three or four times daily. He relies on the site to plan for sailboat racing and for the sailing lessons he gives. He uses it to advise boaters passing through The Chandlery, his shop in Eagle Harbor on Bainbridge Island, what conditions they can expect on the water and which areas will be the most windy.

“I use it all the time,” Schoonmaker said. “You can see every quarter-mile or half-mile what the wind is doing,” he said. “It’s a fabulous public service.”

Meteorologist and University of Washington professor Cliff Mass, who manages the Ferry Weather site, said he’s been inundated with emails since he posted on his weather blog about the imminent end of the service.

“The reaction was pretty intense,” Mass said. “Thousands of people a day look at this site. People decide whether they’re going to take their boats out based on it. This is safety.”

The no-fee service was launched in 1999 to give recreational boaters, ferry operators, forecasters and others current information on weather conditions over the water. The state installed weather sensors on seven Washington ferries that measure wind speed, direction, air pressure, temperature and humidity on a minute-by-minute basis as the ferries travel along their routes.

The data are transmitted over radio to land, then sent over the Internet to the University of Washington, where the information is processed and posted on the Ferry Weather site.

By contrast, the National Weather Service’s marine forecasts measure wind over land, which can differ radically from wind conditions on the water, and its forecasts are only updated four times daily unless conditions change.

The Ferry Weather is updated almost constantly, Schoonmaker said. “My customers who want to go to the San Juan Islands can look at the weather up at Admiralty Inlet or the ferry runs at Friday Harbor or Lopez Island,” he said.

“You can get a nice, broad picture. And it’s fast. There’s no other good source for this kind of data.”

The state currently contracts with Kent, Wash.-based Meteor Communications to provide the technology used for the Ferry Weather site, at an annual cost of about $10,000. Mass said the state could easily replace the service by equipping ferries with data loggers that use wireless Internet to transmit information and cost about $1,500 each.

The site gets about 1 million hits a year, according to Coursey, and Mass said the service is so popular that numerous users have offered to pay to keep it going. Such an arrangement would be highly unusual for a government agency, but the University of Washington has offered to cover the costs of the data loggers with leftover grant funding, Mass said.

But Coursey said funding isn’t the only issue. State ferries are equipped with wireless Internet service that is often interrupted during periods of stormy weather or when the vessels enter certain areas, she said.

“We have customers that are in the middle of an Internet connection and the boat goes through Rich Passage or somewhere like that and they lose their connection,” she said. “It’s a less than ideal system.”

Coursey said she’d “be very surprised” if a new system is in place by the end of June, which means the service likely won’t be available for a time, regardless of what decision is ultimately reached.

“We’re looking at a different technology and a different system when we transition over,” she said. “We don’t want to make promises about something we can’t deliver on.”