Sidedish Surf Stats

The figure shows the combination of swells directed at Sidedish through a typical June, based on 3266 NWW3 model predictions since 2006 (values every 3 hours). The wave model does not forecast surf and wind right at the coastline so we have chosen the optimum grid node based on what we know about Sidedish. In this particular case the best grid node is 20 km away (12 miles). The rose diagram shows the distribution of swell sizes and swell direction, 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 98% of the time. Green and yellow show increasing swell sizes and red illustrates the biggest swells, greater than >3m (>10ft). In both graphs, the area of any colour is proportional to how often that size swell happens. The diagram indicates that the most common swell direction, shown by the longest spokes, was N, whereas the the prevailing wind blows from the E. Because the wave model grid is away from the coast, sometimes a strong offshore wind blows largest waves away from Sidedish and out to sea. We group these with the no surf category of the bar chart. To avoid confusion we don't show these in the rose plot. Because wind determines whether or not waves are good for surfing at Sidedish, you can select a similar diagram that shows only the swells that were expected to coincide with glassy or offshore wind conditions. Over an average June, swells large enough to cause clean enough to surf waves at Sidedish run for about 2.0% of the time.

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