Outside Surf Stats

The rose diagram describes the range of swells directed at Outside through an average July, based on 2976 NWW3 model predictions since 2006 (values every 3 hours). The wave model does not forecast surf and wind right at the coast so we have chosen the most applicable grid node based on what we know about Outside, and at Outside the best grid node is 44 km away (27 miles). The rose diagram describes the distribution of swell sizes and directions, while the graph at the bottom shows the same thing without direction information. Five colours show increasing wave sizes. The smallest swells, less than 0.5m (1.5 feet), high are coloured blue. These happened only 94% of the time. Green and yellow illustrate increasing swell sizes and red illustrates the highest swells, greater than >3m (>10ft). In each graph, the area of any colour is proportional to how commonly that size swell was forecast. The diagram implies that the dominant swell direction, shown by the longest spokes, was NE, whereas the the dominant wind blows from the ESE. Because the wave model grid is offshore, sometimes a strong offshore wind blows largest waves away from Outside and away from the coast. We group these with the no surf category of the bar chart. To simplify things we don't show these in the rose plot. Because wind determines whether or not waves are clean enough to surf at Outside, you can select a similar diagram that shows only the swells that were forecast to coincide with glassy or offshore wind conditions. In a typical July, swells large enough to cause surfable waves at Outside run for about 6% of the time.

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