White Cows Surf Stats

The graph illustrates the range of swells directed at White Cows through an average September. It is based on 3360 NWW3 model predictions since 2006 (values every 3 hours). The wave model does not forecast wind and surf right at the coastline so we have chosen the most applicable grid node based on what we know about White Cows. In the case of White Cows, the best grid node is 16 km away (10 miles). The rose diagram illustrates the distribution of swell sizes and swell direction, while the graph at the bottom shows the same thing without 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 3% of the time. Green and yellow show increasing swell sizes and red represents the largest 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 largest spokes, was ESE (which was the same as the most common wind direction). Because the wave model grid is away from the coast, sometimes a strong offshore wind blows largest waves away from White Cows 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 good for surfing at White Cows, 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 September, swells large enough to cause clean enough to surf waves at White Cows run for about 97% of the time.

read more