St Ouen's Bay - Watersplash Surf Stats

The figure describes the variation of swells directed at St Ouen's Bay - Watersplash through an average June and is based upon 3265 NWW3 model predictions since 2006 (values every 3 hours). The wave model does not forecast wind and surf right at the coastline so we have chosen the most applicable grid node based on what we know about St Ouen's Bay - Watersplash. In this particular case the best grid node is 37 km away (23 miles). The rose diagram describes the distribution of swell directions and swell sizes, while the graph at the bottom shows the same thing but without direction information. Five colours show increasing wave sizes. The smallest swells, less than 0.5m (1.5 feet), high are coloured blue. These were forecast 28% of the time. Green and yellow show increasing swell sizes and red shows the highest swells, greater than >3m (>10ft). In both graphs, the area of any colour is proportional to how frequently that size swell happens. The diagram suggests that the prevailing swell direction, shown by the biggest spokes, was W, 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 St Ouen's Bay - Watersplash 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 diagram. Because wind determines whether or not waves are surfable at St Ouen's Bay - Watersplash, you can view an alternative image that shows only the swells that were expected to coincide with glassy or offshore wind conditions. In a typical June, swells large enough to cause good for surfing waves at St Ouen's Bay - Watersplash run for about 72% of the time.

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