This image shows only the swells directed at Los Gringos that coincided with light winds or offshore conditions through a typical southern hemisphere autumn and is based upon 4850 predictions, one every 3 hours. The direction of the spokes show where quality surf generating swell comes from. Five colours illustrate increasing wave sizes. Blue shows the smallest swells, less that 0.5m (1.5 feet) high. Green and yellow show increasing swell sizes and biggest swells greater than >3m (>10ft) are shown in red. In each graph, the area of any colour is proportional to how commonly that size swell happens.

The diagram implies that the prevailing swell direction, shown by the longest spokes, was SW, whereas the the prevailing wind blows from the SSW. The chart at the bottom shows the same thing but without direction information. For example, swells larger than 1.5 feet (0.5m) coincided with good wind conditions 9% of the time, equivalent to 8 days. Open sea swells exceeding >3m (>10ft) are unlikely to arise in a normal southern hemisphere autumn but 5% of the time we expect swell in the range 2-3m (6.5-10ft) 5%, equivalent to (5 days). Taking into account the proportion of these swells that coincided with forecast offshore winds, and given the fact that Los Gringos is exposed to open water swells, we estimate that clean surf can be found at Los Gringos about 9% of the time and that surf is messed up by onshore wind 91% of the time. This is means that we expect 91 days with waves in a typical southern hemisphere autumn, of which 8 days should be surfable.

IMPORTANT: Beta version feature! Swell heights are open water values from NWW3. There is no attempt to model near-shore effects. Coastal wave heights will generally be less, especially if the break does not have unobstructed exposure to the open ocean.