This image shows only the swells directed at Toad's Peak that coincided with light winds or offshore conditions over a normal 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 represent increasing wave sizes. Very small swells of less than 0.5m (1.5 feet) high are shown in blue. Green and yellow show increasing swell sizes and red represents highest swells greater than >3m (>10ft). In either graph, the area of any colour is proportional to how frequently that size swell occurs.

The diagram suggests that the prevailing swell direction, shown by the biggest spokes, was NE, whereas the the dominant wind blows from the ENE. 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 3% of the time, equivalent to 3 days. Open sea swells exceeding >3m (>10ft) are unlikely to happen in a normal northern hemisphere winter. Taking into account the proportion of these swells that coincided with predicted offshore winds, and given the fact that Toad's Peak is exposed to open water swells, we think that that clean surf can be found at Toad's Peak about 3% of the time and that surf is messed up by onshore wind 93% of the time. This is means that we expect 87 days with waves in a typical northern hemisphere winter, of which 3 days should be clean enough to surf.

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.