Statistiques de Surf de Fraser Island - Indian Head

The figure shows the combination of swells directed at Fraser Island - Indian Head through an average August, based on 3582 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 most applicable grid node based on what we know about Fraser Island - Indian Head. In this particular case the best grid node is 14 km away (9 miles). The rose diagram describes the distribution of swell sizes and swell direction, 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 14% of the time. Green and yellow illustrate increasing swell sizes and biggest swells greater than >3m (>10ft) are shown in red. In each graph, the area of any colour is proportional to how frequently that size swell was forecast. The diagram suggests that the dominant swell direction, shown by the largest spokes, was ESE, whereas the the prevailing wind blows from the SE. Because the wave model grid is offshore, sometimes a strong offshore wind blows largest waves away from Fraser Island - Indian Head and away from the coast. We group these with the no surf category of the bar chart. To simplify things we don't show these in the rose graph. Because wind determines whether or not waves are good for surfing at Fraser Island - Indian Head, you can select a similar diagram that shows only the swells that were expected to coincide with glassy or offshore wind conditions. In a typical August, swells large enough to cause clean enough to surf waves at Fraser Island - Indian Head run for about 86% of the time.

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