Dead Man's Land Surf Stats

The rose diagram shows the range of swells directed at Dead Man's Land through a typical November, based on 2867 NWW3 model predictions since 2006 (values every 3 hours). The wave model does not forecast wind and surf right at the coast so we have chosen the best grid node based on what we know about Dead Man's Land, and at Dead Man's Land the best grid node is 17 km away (11 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 35% of the time. Green and yellow represent increasing swell sizes and red illustrates the biggest swells, greater than >3m (>10ft). In each graph, the area of any colour is proportional to how commonly that size swell occurs. The diagram implies that the prevailing swell direction, shown by the longest spokes, was SE, whereas the the prevailing wind blows from the N. Because the wave model grid is out to sea, sometimes a strong offshore wind blows largest waves away from Dead Man's Land and offshore. We combine these with the no surf category of the bar chart. To simplify things we don't show these in the rose plot. Because wind determines whether or not waves are surfable at Dead Man's Land, you can select a similar diagram that shows only the swells that were predicted to coincide with glassy or offshore wind conditions. Over an average November, swells large enough to cause good for surfing waves at Dead Man's Land run for about 65% of the time.

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