Harbor House Surf Stats

This chart illustrates the range of swells directed at Harbor House over a normal May, based on 3440 NWW3 model predictions since 2007 (values every 3 hours). The wave model does not forecast wind and surf right at the coastline so we have chosen the optimum grid node based on what we know about Harbor House. In the case of Harbor House, the best grid node is 16 km away (10 miles). The rose diagram shows the distribution of swell sizes and directions, while the graph at the bottom shows the same thing without direction information. Five colours illustrate increasing wave sizes. Blue shows the smallest swells, less that 0.5m (1.5 feet) high. These occurred 49% of the time. Green and yellow show increasing swell sizes and red illustrates the largest swells, greater than >3m (>10ft). In either graph, the area of any colour is proportional to how often that size swell occurs. The diagram indicates that the prevailing swell direction, shown by the biggest spokes, was E, whereas the the most common wind blows from the SE. Because the wave model grid is away from the coast, sometimes a strong offshore wind blows largest waves away from Harbor House and out to sea. We group these with the no surf category of the bar chart. To simplify things we don't show these in the rose diagram. Because wind determines whether or not waves are surfable at Harbor House, you can view an alternative image that shows only the swells that were expected to coincide with glassy or offshore wind conditions. During a typical May, swells large enough to cause good for surfing waves at Harbor House run for about 51% of the time.

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