Redwood Creek Surf Stats

The figure illustrates the combination of swells directed at Redwood Creek through a typical October, based on 3471 NWW3 model predictions since 2006 (values every 3 hours). The wave model does not forecast wind or surf right at the shore so we have chosen the best grid node based on what we know about Redwood Creek. In the case of Redwood Creek, the best grid node is 41 km away (25 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 5% of the time. Green and yellow show increasing swell sizes and red illustrates the largest swells, greater than >3m (>10ft). In either graph, the area of any colour is proportional to how often that size swell was forecast. The diagram indicates that the most common swell direction, shown by the largest spokes, was WNW, whereas the the most common wind blows from the NW. Because the wave model grid is offshore, sometimes a strong offshore wind blows largest waves away from Redwood Creek and away from the coast. We lump these in 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 Redwood Creek, 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 October, swells large enough to cause good for surfing waves at Redwood Creek run for about 95% of the time.

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