Male Surf Stats

The figure describes the range of swells directed at Male through an average July. It is based on 3472 NWW3 model predictions since 2006 (values every 3 hours). The wave model does not forecast surf and wind right at the coast so we have chosen the most applicable grid node based on what we know about Male. In the case of Male, the best grid node is 20 km away (12 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 happened only 7% of the time. Green and yellow illustrate increasing swell sizes and red illustrates highest swells greater than >3m (>10ft). In each graph, the area of any colour is proportional to how often that size swell occurs. The diagram indicates that the dominant swell direction, shown by the biggest spokes, was S, whereas the the dominant wind blows from the WSW. Because the wave model grid is offshore, sometimes a strong offshore wind blows largest waves away from Male and away from the coast. We lump these in with the no surf category of the bar chart. To keep it simple we don't show these in the rose diagram. Because wind determines whether or not waves are clean enough to surf at Male, you can load a different image that shows only the swells that were expected to coincide with glassy or offshore wind conditions. In a typical July, swells large enough to cause surfable waves at Male run for about 93% of the time.

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