South East Queensland and Northern New South Wales Surf Forecast by Ben Matson (issued Monday 22nd December)

Best Days: Thurs onwards: building east swell, you'll just have to work around the local winds. Sat/Sun/Mon: chance for a local SE swell for the SE Qld semi-exposed points.

Recap: Small combo of south swell and south-east windswell over the weekend, but hardly worth the effort with mainly onshore winds. Small residual swell today with early light winds tending onshore and freshening during the day.

This week (Dec 23 - 26)

Not a great deal to get excited about in the short term, but we will certainly see an improvement over the last few days.

Right now we’ve got two active sources of swell generation for our coast. A modest ridge across the central/northern Tasman Sea is showing ~20kt SE winds aimed into the Coral Sea (see below). This fetch won’t last very long but should kick up a small SE swell for the region, arriving through Tuesday and easing later Wednesday.

Also hitting our shores on Tuesday is a small, distant east swell generated by a broad, slow moving band of tradewinds that developed north and north-east of New Zealand over the weekend.

Initially, there won’t be much size from it: probably some inconsistent 2ft+ sets at open beaches from about Tuesday afternoon onwards, with long breaks between waves (expect smaller surf Tuesday morning). The morning’s light winds will give way to an afternoon sea breeze so it’s hard to get too excited right now.

Wednesday will see light winds in most areas for much of the day owing to a weak pressure gradient (freshening nor’easter are likely south of Coffs though), and the early session should still have intermittent pulses of this swell combo on hand. It won’t be very strong nor sizeable but if you’ve got a high volume board there could be a few little waves about the traps.

Late in the day, we may see the leading edge of a second, stronger pulse of easterly swell generated by the stationary trade belt in the South Pacific. This is expected to be the beginning of an extended period of distant east swell (as I’ve been discussing since last Monday) and wave heights should nudge up into the 2-3ft+ range throughout Thursday (Christmas Day) - possibly a little undersized early but well and truly into fifth gear by the afternoon. 

Freshening NE winds are expected during Thursday afternoon (following a period of light, variable winds early) but they’ll be a little weaker in Far Northern NSW and SE Qld, so hopefully conditions will remain OK for an afternoon session in these areas.

This east swell is then forecast to ebb and flow within this size range through Friday with winds holding from the northern quadrant (lighter early, probably NW).

We do have a southerly change expected to push along the Southern NSW coast during the day (of which its timing is not yet clear) so this may throw a few curveballs for local winds - especially across the Mid North Coast - but there’s a reasonable amount of certainty on the swell front, which is encouraging. I’ll fine tune the forecast for the second half of the week on Wednesday.

This weekend (Dec 27 - 28)

The aforementioned trade swell will continue to supply our region with inconsistent but reliable easterly energy through the weekend and beyond, within a similar size range as per the end of the week.

Also on the charts is a possible trough in the lower Coral Sea, pushing up against a ridge in the wake of Friday’s late southerly change across the North Coast.  Although there’s no general consensus across the broader models, such a development is certainly not out of place for this time of year.

If this scenario occurs we could be looking at a reasonable short range SE event with gusty S/SE winds building Saturday and holding into Sunday, suitable for the semi-exposed points in SE Qld. I’ll have more on the chances of this in Wednesday’s updates. 

Long term (Dec 29 onwards)

Aside from the stationary trade belt in the South Pacific - which looks like it’ll hang around in some form for the next couple of weeks - there are no significant weather systems on the long term charts. I’ll take a closer look at the long term outlook on Wednesday.