South East Queensland and Northern New South Wales Surf Forecast by Ben Matson (issued Wednesday 11th March)

Best Days: The surf will slowly improve (benefiting semi-exposed poitns) right throughout the forecast period. Looks to be best early next week with a strong E'ly swell but local winds are unsure. 

Recap: Tiny, poor waves Tuesday. Building trade swell today but low in strength/quality and affected by SE winds at most locations. Despite the lacklustre energy, Snapper Rocks has been picking up occasional chest-shoulder-head high sets (2ft to occ 3ft) throughout this afternoon offering ‘contestable’ options for the WSL competition.

This week (Mar 12 - 13)

No major changes to the forecast for the rest of this week. We’ve essentially got one source of swell, and that’s the trade belt that’s been slowly muscling up through the southern Coral Sea over the last day or so. 

The current synoptic pattern lends itself to two main characteristics - a slow increase in size through into the weekend, and a focus of the largest waves toward northern locations. As such, the Sunshine Coast will see the biggest size, with incrementally smaller waves with increasing southerly latitude. 

As for heights, Thursday should slightly bigger waves than what we’ve had today and Friday’s looking a little bigger again - by the afternoon, the Sunshine Coast’s open beaches will be quite bumpy but somewhere between 3-5ft (expect smaller surf across the points, very small at super protected locations like inside Noosa). The Gold Coast will be little smaller (3-4ft), with Northern NSW likely to see 2-3ft+ surf. 

On the surface, conditions will be mixed courtesy of a ridge across the Queensland coast that’ll maintain mainly fresh and gusty SE winds in most regions (although pockets of lighter SW winds are likely in a few key locations - Coolangatta being one of them). 

Ordinarily under such a synoptic setup winds would be lighter south of about Yamba (and this will be the case on Thursday) but we’ve got a second ridge building across the NSW coast on Friday and this will bring about a gusty S/SE airstream to the Mid North Coast during the morning, extending to northern regions in the afternoon (and enhancing the Coral Sea ridge into Friday night). 

As for the WSL - they’re scheduled to finish the event late Friday and this is certainly when we’ll see the biggest waves of their extended window. As mentioned on Monday, under trade swell events Snapper Rocks is as reliable as an open beaches so we should see 3-4ft sets here (overhead) although there’ll be a sou’east wobble on top, with generally clean faces as it runs down the point. Hardly epic but certainly a decent finish in what's been a terrible fortnight of Queensland waves.  

This weekend (Mar 14 - 15)

There’s quite a lot to consider when assessing the weekend’s surf outlook.

First of all, by late Friday TC Pam (the big cyclone out near the Solomons, likely to be Cat 5 by this time) will be starting to track between Fiji and New Caledonia, ridging against a large high pressure system just east of New Zealand. 

At the same time, a ridge through the Coral Sea will extend north to (recently named) TC Nathan in the Far Northern Coral Sea, and the NSW ridge associated with Friday’s change will  strengthen the SE flow through these waters.

Right now we can certainly discount both Tropical Cyclones for swell potential (more on that below), so the weekend’s surf will originate from the strengthening SE flow through the Coral Sea. This should essentially maintain the same size and conditions as what we’re expecting late Friday, although it’ll probably have more SE in direction. This will create a slightly larger variations in size between exposed beaches and protected points, and will also maintain smaller surf south of about Ballina or Yamba as the fetch won’t extend much further south than about 30 degrees. 

Additionally, fresh S/SE winds all weekend will really only favour the semi-exposed points, as the open beaches will be blown out.

As for size - and this is for exposed beaches - expect 4-5ft waves across the Sunshine Coast, 3-4ft+ across the Gold Coast, 3-4ft in Far Northern NSW, 2-3ft+ south to about Coffs Harbour and 2-3ft south to Seal Rocks. Saturday will probably see the upper end of this size range with a slight easing trend into Sunday. A stronger E’ly swell is then expected to arrive overnight Sunday and this may nudge up wave heights in the few hours before dark (on Sunday), probably around 4-5ft at most exposed coasts. 

You'll need to adjust accordingly for your preferred protected surf spot.

As a side note, the computer models are also picking up some very long period NE swell (21.4 seconds!) on Sunday afternoon, across the Mid North Coast (see chart below, from Coffs Harbour). In actual fact, the periods are a little higher in southern NSW (but with a later arrival) however the models forecast for Far Northern NSW or SE Qld isn’t picking this up. 

This is what the global wave model is estimating will be generated from the core of TC Pam whilst it’s tucked up high in the Coral Sea at Cat 4 or Cat 5 strength - and qualifies the reason that southern NSW is modelled to pick up these long period swells whilst SE Qld won’t (SE Qld will be in the swell shadow for longer). 

However the chances of this scenario eventuating - and then producing any notable swell - is very low.

The fetch length of these core winds is very small and the travel distance is enormous, so even if the NSW buoys do pick up a faint signal, I’m doubtful that we’ll see any true cyclone swell anywhere on the East Coast for that matter. Nevertheless, in the interests of good science experimentation, it’ll be well worth keeping an eye on the buoy data throughout Sunday.

Next week (Mar 16 onwards)

We’ve still got a very complex forecast chart to decipher for next week. However the fundamentals of Monday’s forecast notes remain in place, and that is (1) I’m disregarding TC Pam as a major source of groundswell, mainly due to to its rapid SE path once it clears the swell shadow of New Caledonia, and (2) any surf we see next week will originate from the supporting ridge to the south of TC Pam.

Nevertheless, we will see a building trade swell from this overall progression from through the first half of next week. Currently thinking is (and I’ll revise the specifics on Friday with the latest model data) that we’ll see strong E’ly swell in the 4-5ft+ range at most open beaches on Monday, backing to the E/SE on Tuesday with a minor easing, then slowly falling more steadily in size through Wednesday. Expect smaller waves at protected points.

The local wind outlook is a little tricky for next week though, with the models at complete odds with each other - the European solution has a developing Tasman low and a strong S’ly winds for a few days, yet the US solution maintains a weak ridge and generally light winds and sea breezes. Obviously the European solution would also contribute a solid S/SE swell into the mix too.

This uncertainty in the long term model guidance also extends to TC Nathan (in the Far Northern Coral Sea). Right now I doubt we'll see any surf potential until the second half of next week at the earliest and there’s a reasonable chance that it may remain too far north to ever influence our surf prospects at all (as per latest Euro data). 

As such let’s see how Friday’s model runs pan out because right now there is a quite a wide range of options on the cards: it’s simply too early to plan anything with so much divergence across the board.

See you Friday!