Playa de Ladeira Surf Stats

The rose diagram describes the combination of swells directed at Playa de Ladeira through a typical May. It is based on 3440 NWW3 model predictions since 2007 (values every 3 hours). The wave model does not forecast wind and surf right at the coastline so we have chosen the most applicable grid node based on what we know about Playa de Ladeira. In the case of Playa de Ladeira, the best grid node is 9 km away (6 miles). The rose diagram illustrates the distribution of swell sizes and directions, while the graph at the bottom shows the same thing but lacks 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 54% of the time. Green and yellow represent increasing swell sizes and red represents the highest swells, greater than >3m (>10ft). In each graph, the area of any colour is proportional to how commonly that size swell was forecast. The diagram implies that the prevailing swell direction, shown by the biggest spokes, was W, whereas the the dominant wind blows from the NNW. Because the wave model grid is offshore, sometimes a strong offshore wind blows largest waves away from Playa de Ladeira 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 surfable at Playa de Ladeira, 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 May, swells large enough to cause good for surfing waves at Playa de Ladeira run for about 28% of the time.

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