Quicombo Surf Stats

The rose diagram illustrates the range of swells directed at Quicombo through an average August. It is based on 3590 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 optimum grid node based on what we know about Quicombo. In the case of Quicombo, the best grid node is 40 km away (25 miles). The rose diagram describes the distribution of swell sizes and directions, 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 0.9% of the time. Green and yellow represent increasing swell sizes and red represents the largest swells, greater than >3m (>10ft). In both graphs, the area of any colour is proportional to how often that size swell was forecast. The diagram indicates that the prevailing swell direction, shown by the largest spokes, was SW, whereas the the most common wind blows from the WSW. Because the wave model grid is away from the coast, sometimes a strong offshore wind blows largest waves away from Quicombo and out to sea. We group these with the no surf category of the bar chart. To keep it simple we don't show these in the rose plot. Because wind determines whether or not waves are clean enough to surf at Quicombo, you can load a different image that shows only the swells that were predicted to coincide with glassy or offshore wind conditions. In a typical August, swells large enough to cause surfable waves at Quicombo run for about 99% of the time.

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