Le Goudoul Surf Stats

The figure illustrates the combination of swells directed at Le Goudoul through a typical August. It is based on 3582 NWW3 model predictions since 2006 (values every 3 hours). The wave model does not forecast surf and wind right at the shore so we have chosen the best grid node based on what we know about Le Goudoul, and at Le Goudoul the best grid node is 31 km away (19 miles). The rose diagram shows the distribution of swell sizes and directions, 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 28% of the time. Green and yellow show increasing swell sizes and red shows largest swells greater than >3m (>10ft). In either graph, the area of any colour is proportional to how commonly that size swell occurs. The diagram implies that the prevailing swell direction, shown by the largest spokes, was W, whereas the the most common wind blows from the WNW. Because the wave model grid is offshore, sometimes a strong offshore wind blows largest waves away from Le Goudoul and away from the coast. We combine these with the no surf category of the bar chart. To simplify things we don't show these in the rose plot. Because wind determines whether or not waves are surfable at Le Goudoul, you can load a different image that shows only the swells that were forecast to coincide with glassy or offshore wind conditions. Over an average August, swells large enough to cause good for surfing waves at Le Goudoul run for about 72% of the time.

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