Salgar Surf Stats

The figure describes the range of swells directed at Salgar through a typical April, based on 2639 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 optimum grid node based on what we know about Salgar, and at Salgar the best grid node is 8 km away (5 miles). The rose diagram describes the distribution of swell sizes and directions, while the graph at the bottom shows the same thing without direction information. Five colours illustrate increasing wave sizes. Blue shows the smallest swells, less that 0.5m (1.5 feet) high. These happened only 1.1% of the time. Green and yellow show increasing swell sizes and red illustrates highest 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 longest spokes, was NE (which was the same as the dominant wind direction). Because the wave model grid is away from the coast, sometimes a strong offshore wind blows largest waves away from Salgar 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 graph. Because wind determines whether or not waves are surfable at Salgar, you can load a different image that shows only the swells that were forecast to coincide with glassy or offshore wind conditions. Over an average April, swells large enough to cause good for surfing waves at Salgar run for about 99% of the time.

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