El Jadida Surf Stats

This picture describes the range of swells directed at El Jadida through a typical May, based on 2838 NWW3 model predictions since 2007 (values every 3 hours). The wave model does not forecast surf and wind right at the shore so we have chosen the most applicable grid node based on what we know about El Jadida. In the case of El Jadida, the best grid node is 26 km away (16 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 show increasing wave sizes. The smallest swells, less than 0.5m (1.5 feet), high are coloured blue. These occurred only 1.4% of the time. Green and yellow illustrate increasing swell sizes and red illustrates highest swells greater than >3m (>10ft). In either graph, 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 biggest spokes, was NW, whereas the the dominant wind blows from the NNW. Because the wave model grid is away from the coast, sometimes a strong offshore wind blows largest waves away from El Jadida and out to sea. We lump these in with the no surf category of the bar chart. To simplify things we don't show these in the rose graph. Because wind determines whether or not waves are surfable at El Jadida, 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 May, swells large enough to cause good for surfing waves at El Jadida run for about 99% of the time.

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