Reef Runway (Hickam Harbor) Surf Stats

This picture describes the range of swells directed at Reef Runway (Hickam Harbor) through a typical April. It is based on 3360 NWW3 model predictions since 2007 (values every 3 hours). The wave model does not forecast surf and wind right at the coastline so we have chosen the best grid node based on what we know about Reef Runway (Hickam Harbor). In this particular case the best grid node is 35 km away (22 miles). The rose diagram shows the distribution of swell directions and swell sizes, while the graph at the bottom shows the same thing but lacks direction information. Five colours represent increasing wave sizes. Very small swells of less than 0.5m (1.5 feet) high are shown in blue. These happened only 69% of the time. Green and yellow represent increasing swell sizes and red represents the highest swells, greater than >3m (>10ft). In either graph, the area of any colour is proportional to how often that size swell happens. The diagram indicates that the dominant swell direction, shown by the longest spokes, was SSW, whereas the the dominant wind blows from the ENE. Because the wave model grid is away from the coast, sometimes a strong offshore wind blows largest waves away from Reef Runway (Hickam Harbor) 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 Reef Runway (Hickam Harbor), you can load a different image that shows only the swells that were predicted to coincide with glassy or offshore wind conditions. Over an average April, swells large enough to cause good for surfing waves at Reef Runway (Hickam Harbor) run for about 31% of the time.

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