Analysis: New buoy records Fiji swells
As groundbreaking as the 2012 Volcom Swell and the weekend's Ramon Swell at Cloudbreak have been, we've never been able to ascertain how big the open ocean swell was. That's because we've never had real time buoy observations to analyse the signature of each swell. There are no buoys in the path of Fiji swells. Nothing in the Southern Ocean, Tasman Sea, or around Fiji itself.
That all changed earlier this month when a new wave buoy was deployed off Fiji's Coral Coast, offshore from the small village of Cuvu, approximately halfway between Cloudbreak to the north-west and Frigates to the south-east.
In 1991 a buoy was deployed off Frigates, yet it only lasted a year, but this new buoy is permanent and will fill a crucial data gap in the South Pacific Ocean, while also helping calibrate global wave models.
The bonus for surfers is not only to geek out on the data from the weekend's back to back XXL swells, but also use the buoy to confirm the arrival of new swell energy across the region and plan trips out to the reefs.
Coming back to the past weekend (see images below) and we can see that the two swells weren't dissimilar in size at their peaks.
The first kicked strongly Friday afternoon and peaked overnight to a significant wave height of 4.67m before dropping steadily Saturday, while Sunday's swell pushed close to this size through the daylight hours, but then peaked at an incredible 4.91m at 11:20pm.
The main difference though were the peak swell periods, with Friday/Saturday's coming in just under 15s, while Sunday's was a stronger 17s.
Both swells, however, peaked under the cover of darkness. Considering what Ramon Navarro and Makua Rothman rode while the sun was up, it's worth thinking about what could have been. To put it bluntly: it's highly likely that even bigger waves broke at Cloudbreak during the night.
Next time, hey?
Sunday's swell which hovered above 4m at peak periods of 17s has set the new benchmark for swells in this region, and will be referenced in future years. As long as the buoy stays anchored in position!
Comments
Mark Visser, might have been out there with a headlamp and torches aka the "night rider" ?!
I must say I was really impressed when Visser rode that one jaws swell at night. No one saw that coming.
your sampling rate is 2.5 hours (assuming its some mean from a higher sampling rate or a calculation from energy) and you think that your analysis can pick up a single set?
If the buoy would have been placed at cloudbreak the graph could easily have a maximum somewhere else during the day..
There's many things to infer from the data. A buoy off CB may have recorded bigger waves, smaller waves, an earlier peak, a later peak - we'll never know. But having closely observed clusters of buoy data for the last seventeen years (across the NSW/Qld coasts), my take is that nothing is guaranteed - buoys that should record stronger energy don't always do so, and trends across the buoys never always pan out as they should either.
Based on the broad data presented above, Craig is correct in theory that the biggest waves may have occured overnight. Of course, we'll never know but it's a great place to begin the discussion, eh?
Is the data accessible for the general public?
Here ya go Island Bay.. Fiji Wave Buoy
Change the sampling rate to 300.Cheers mate!
I read the marker being on 11.20 AM not PM on Sunday. As it's all in 24 hr time. By 11 pm the swell has dropped to around 3.5m. For Friday it peaks around 10.30 AM.
Time is usually displayed in UTC, which is denoted by the 'Z' at the end of the timestamp (Z stands for 'Zulu', though its actually denotes 'Zero' - as in +0 hours - but by using NATO phonetic alphabet, this was assigned to Zulu).
Fiji is UTC +12 hours.
Ah yes, does make sense having everything in UTC so swells can be tracked between buoys in different time zones without having to work out the time differences.
The timestamps are in UTC Steev.
I double checked this yesterday.
Ie 11:00 = 11pm and 23:00 = 11am.
You can compare it to this morning's data which has the latest update 2018-05-29 T22:27, which is acutally 10:27am on the 30th, not last night.
Very confusing and would be easier if set to local time.
Snap!
Met/Ocean convention needs a standard though so it makes sense to display in UTC. An additional local timestamp would be handy though.
That buoy will be a pretty handy fishing spot too, mahi mahi, yellowfin tuna and wahoo anyone??
As long as no-one ties up their bloody boat to the mooring.
Fascinating how a 5m swell plus swell period in the open ocean translates to that monster that Navarro was on.
More closer to 4.5 m if your rounding it off i think.
The 4.9m spike was in the night but in the daytime it was hovering between 4 - 4.5m.
I find buoys are very accurate on big clean swells and you can virtually see the spike on the buoy and you can see it when your surfing the swell on the day . Even if the buoys miles away, (hundreds of miles even) Thats just my opinion and its cool if some don't believe that no worries. Its actually not hard to notice, but you probably have to be there to feel it, and tune into the energy of the swells in some way .
A big wave break makes it hard to miss the obvious rhythm of XXL sets
Reasonable to assume that CB is a bit of a magnet? Or perhaps the swell just happened to hit it better than the buoy location
The buoy died?
Hmm link here is also Dead
https://gem.spc.int/news/2020/06/new-buoy-to-provide-better-wave-forecas...
Yeah bummer. Expensive things to fix or replace.
Yeah none of the links or portals are working.
There are floating spotter buoys that you can get data from though.
There's one south of Fiji right now.
https://weather.sofarocean.com/?plotQuantity=wave-period
Spotter 1478.
Hours of entertainment! Thanks
Who pays for those? Seems like a fairly expensive operation.
Kamchatka 0498
Not ideal, inside the Aleutian chain.
Fiji swell buoy long gone....
Who knows how big dat was?