King's Beach (Port Elizabeth) Surf Stats

This image describes the combination of swells directed at King's Beach (Port Elizabeth) through an average August. It is based on 3590 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 most applicable grid node based on what we know about King's Beach (Port Elizabeth), and at King's Beach (Port Elizabeth) the best grid node is 14 km away (9 miles). The rose diagram illustrates the distribution of swell sizes and swell direction, while the graph at the bottom shows the same thing without direction information. Five colours illustrate increasing wave sizes. Blue shows the smallest swells, less that 0.5m (1.5 feet) high. These occurred only 71% of the time. Green and yellow represent increasing swell sizes and red shows highest swells greater than >3m (>10ft). In both graphs, the area of any colour is proportional to how often that size swell was forecast. The diagram indicates that the dominant swell direction, shown by the biggest spokes, was SSE, whereas the the dominant wind blows from the WNW. Because the wave model grid is offshore, sometimes a strong offshore wind blows largest waves away from King's Beach (Port Elizabeth) 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 diagram. Because wind determines whether or not waves are surfable at King's Beach (Port Elizabeth), you can load a different image that shows only the swells that were forecast to coincide with glassy or offshore wind conditions. In a typical August, swells large enough to cause good for surfing waves at King's Beach (Port Elizabeth) run for about 27% of the time.

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