Bay of Plenty Surf Stats

This chart describes the range of swells directed at Bay of Plenty through a typical July. It is based on 3720 NWW3 model predictions since 2006 (values every 3 hours). The wave model does not forecast wind and surf right at the coastline so we have chosen the optimum grid node based on what we know about Bay of Plenty, and at Bay of Plenty the best grid node is 18 km away (11 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 represent increasing wave sizes. Very small swells of less than 0.5m (1.5 feet) high are shown in blue. These happened only 24% of the time. Green and yellow illustrate 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 dominant swell direction, shown by the biggest spokes, was SE, 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 Bay of Plenty 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 graph. Because wind determines whether or not waves are surfable at Bay of Plenty, you can select a similar diagram that shows only the swells that were expected to coincide with glassy or offshore wind conditions. Over an average July, swells large enough to cause good for surfing waves at Bay of Plenty run for about 76% of the time.

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