Let’s listen to what it has to say, but yes

Data and Methodology

Wave Consistency w/ Error Bars

Here’s the plot of percentage of days by wave height per month. In order to get this data, I downloaded historic buoy spectrum data, took wind waves out of the spectrum, calculated wave heights by integrating the energy/frequency values, and converted to feet from meters. I then used the standard buoy data to assign wave direction to each corresponding time stamp by making the assumption that the mean wave direction was going to be the swell direction (not always the case). After that, I applied an algorithm to convert buoy heights to rough breaking wave heights based on my experience forecasting. Lastly, I aggregated the data by month, divided raw counts by the sum of raw counts to get percentages, and plotted them to create the above figure. I’m comfortable enough with the methodology to say that this should be fairly accurate.

Let’s call a surfable day anthing equal to, or above, waist high. This corresponds to anything not flat in the above chart. So, subtracting the value for flat from 1.0 yields the percentage of days that should be large enough to surf. Let’s look at that chart:

PercentageOfSurfableDays

Before breaking into the discussion portion of this here blog post, it’s important to note that this doesn’t include wind (it could be blown out), daylight hours (could eb dark), or tide heights (could be swamped). It’s just the theoretical max percentage of surfable days.

Discussion

First, let’s look at the obvious. Summer (months 6-8) sucks. We know that. Personally, I feel like June is better than August, but I’m not shocked to see that not be the case. July is the worst, which tracks with my experience.

It’s a bit of a slap in the face to see greater than 50% for September through January given the two-four days a month we’re currently seeing as surfable. November really only had the 8th and the 10th that were any good. There were probably two or three other days that were longboardable, so let’s say 5 total. That’s 5/30 or 16.7% of days.

December thus far has had a surfable day on 12/3 and another on 12/10 with 12/11 fading too quick to really call it surfable. The swell on the 19th is looking iffy, but let’s say it happens, that’s one or two days there, and maybe a day on the 20th and 25th. Four days. 6/30 would be 20%. We’re really not even seeing blown out surf, just none. This is coming off a right tailed U-Wind Anomaly for the majority of November (tons of west wind all month).

Conclusion

History says this year sucks.