Supertubos Surf Stats

This chart describes the variation of swells directed at Supertubos through an average June, based on 3266 NWW3 model predictions since 2006 (values every 3 hours). The wave model does not forecast wind or surf right at the coastline so we have chosen the optimum grid node based on what we know about Supertubos, and at Supertubos the best grid node is 21 km away (13 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 show increasing wave sizes. The smallest swells, less than 0.5m (1.5 feet), high are coloured blue. These happened only 87% of the time. Green and yellow show increasing swell sizes and highest swells greater than >3m (>10ft) are shown in red. In each graph, the area of any colour is proportional to how commonly that size swell occurs. The diagram implies that the most common swell direction, shown by the largest spokes, was W, whereas the the dominant wind blows from the NW. Because the wave model grid is offshore, sometimes a strong offshore wind blows largest waves away from Supertubos and away from the coast. We combine these with the no surf category of the bar chart. To keep it simple we don't show these in the rose plot. Because wind determines whether or not waves are surfable at Supertubos, you can load a different image that shows only the swells that were predicted to coincide with glassy or offshore wind conditions. In a typical June, swells large enough to cause good for surfing waves at Supertubos run for about 7% of the time.

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