This image shows only the swells directed at Ras Al Jazirah that coincided with light winds or offshore conditions through a typical northern hemisphere winter and is based upon 5048 predictions, one every 3 hours. The direction of the spokes show where quality surf generating swell comes from. Five colours show increasing wave sizes. The smallest swells, less than 0.5m (1.5 feet), high are coloured blue. Green and yellow illustrate increasing swell sizes and red illustrates biggest swells greater than >3m (>10ft). In both graphs, the area of any colour is proportional to how frequently that size swell occurs.

The diagram suggests that the dominant swell direction, shown by the largest spokes, was SSE, whereas the the prevailing wind blows from the E. 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 17% of the time, equivalent to 15 days. Open sea swells exceeding >3m (>10ft) are unlikely to happen in a normal northern hemisphere winter. Taking into account the fraction of these swells that coincided with expected offshore winds, and given the fact that Ras Al Jazirah is exposed to open water swells, we calculate that clean surf can be found at Ras Al Jazirah about 17% of the time and that surf is messed up by onshore wind 30% of the time. This is means that we expect 43 days with waves in a typical northern hemisphere winter, of which 15 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.