Wooden Jetties Surf Stats

This chart describes the range of swells directed at Wooden Jetties over a normal October, based on 3470 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 Wooden Jetties. In this particular case the best grid node is 24 km away (15 miles). The rose diagram illustrates the distribution of swell sizes and swell direction, while the graph at the bottom shows the same thing but 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 29% of the time. Green and yellow show increasing swell sizes and highest swells greater than >3m (>10ft) are shown in red. In either graph, the area of any colour is proportional to how commonly that size swell happens. The diagram implies that the dominant swell direction, shown by the longest spokes, was SE, whereas the the dominant wind blows from the WNW. Because the wave model grid is offshore, sometimes a strong offshore wind blows largest waves away from Wooden Jetties and away from the coast. We combine 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 surfable at Wooden Jetties, you can select a similar diagram that shows only the swells that were predicted to coincide with glassy or offshore wind conditions. During a typical October, swells large enough to cause good for surfing waves at Wooden Jetties run for about 30% of the time.

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