South East Queensland and Northern New South Wales Surf Forecast by Ben Matson (issued Monday 8th February)

Best Days: Most days should have OK waves across the points, Wed the biggest but Thurs and Fri probably the next best as local winds should relax a little. Late Sun onwards: standby for some possible E/NE cyclone swell. 

Recap: Plenty of waves over the last few days but the power settings seemed to be a couple of notches below expectations and wave heights struggled to reach the forecast size range. The Gold Coast peaked on Sunday with set waves around the 3ft mark, and south of the border exposed south facing beaches managed 4-6ft waves at times with smaller surf elsewhere, but driving rain and gusty southerlies certainly took the sheen off things. Today we’ve seen abating swells with early SW tending S’ly winds and 2-3ft surf across open SE Qld stretches, and 4-5ft sets south of Byron.  

Next week (Feb 9th - 12th)

The forecast for this week’s renewal of S/SE tending SE swell has been downgraded.

We’re still expecting the same synoptic pattern - a redeveloping Tasman Low to the north-west of New Zealand, with a reasonable north-west track towards our coast - but core wind speeds have been throttled back in the latest model runs.

And that was the primary reason behind the weekend’s weaker-than-expected surf. Core wind speeds ended up falling just below model guidance, so the resulting surf wasn’t quite as big and definitely nowhere near as punchy as we’ve come to expect so far this (excellent) swell season. So I'm going to put these observations into the outlook for the next few days and readjust accordingly. 

We’re looking at two individual components contributing to this week’s increase. Initially, some short range S/SE swell associated with a restrengthening ridge across the coast. This will mainly favour south facing beaches south of the border (with limited quality) and will consequently build during Tuesday.

A slightly better quality SE increase originating from the redeveloped Tasman Low itself will then overlap the pre-existing energy on Wednesday - peaking in the afternoon - and will favour SE Qld to a greater degree. So if you’re north of the border, Wednesday looks like a better bet than Tuesday. 

We should see a peak on Wednesday around 4-5ft across exposed beaches in Northern NSW, and 3ft+ across the Gold and Sunshine Coasts, with smaller waves running down the various points. Expect smaller surf on Tuesday, and a larger difference in size between locations north and south of Byron Bay due to the greater southerly component in the swell direction. 

As for winds, they'll be gusty from the S/SE both days north of about Coffs Harbour, so there won’t be much difference in quality. A few select locations will see early sou’westers but this will probably be confined to the southern Gold Coast. 

South of Coffs we’re looking at gusty S/SE winds on Tuesday but might lighter and more variable winds on Wednesday, especially in the far south towards Seal Rocks. So Wednesday looks like the pick here too.

From Thursday onwards, we should see plenty of user-friendly trade swell, thanks to a slowly easing but steady E/SE fetch through the northern Tasman Sea from Wednesday onwards. This should maintain 3-4ft surf south of Byron Bay, and 2-3ft surf north of the border both days, with mainly light morning SW winds - in more locations than earlier in the week - tending moderate to fresh S/SE throughout the days.

Fairly bog-standard summer patterns, really. Lots of fun in general and with decent wave counts too. 

This weekend and beyond (Feb 13th - 14th and next week)

At this stage, most of Saturday and at least the first half of Sunday are expected to see a continuation of Thursday and Friday’s routine trade swells, somewhere either side of 3ft depending on your beach and its exposure. 

But I know your attention is elsewhere in the swell window, so let’s crack on and get straight to the point. 

A Tropical Low out near the Solomon Islands is expected to deepen rapidly over the coming days, reaching Tropical Cyclone strength before pinballing its way between Vanuatu and Fiji, and then dropping into our eastern swell window by around Friday, at considerable strength (looks Cat 4/5 ish at the moment, though it's very early days).

At this stage the long range model predictions are seriously enticing - suggesting an incredible, large long range E/NE cyclone swell arriving later Sunday or Monday - but we need to give the models a few days to work out what’s going on. At the moment there are some positives and negatives in the model guidance but overall I’m confidence that we’ll see a decent swell event across our coast.

The reason being is that the early stages of this development also has supporting features where it counts the most: a supporting ridge of high pressure in the Tasman Sea, and also a secondary low pressure system in the Coral Sea, contained with an expansive trough. Sometimes we see steering ridges push from this region a little too early in the cycle, which can shunt a cyclone rapidly through the swell window and limit its potential. 

But in this case it looks like the cyclone will move more slowly as it rounds the swell shadow of New Caledonia, which is a very important region for swell production as it’s close to the ocean/atmospheric boundary where these systems turn extra-tropical. If we can get a day or two of swell from this part of the cyclone - which GFS is suggesting its eastern flank (aimed towards us) will see the strongest activity - then we’re at least setting up an active ocean state that be further worked upon in later days. 

So right now, it’s worth pencilling out Sunday afternoon (in case of an early arrival) plus Monday and Tuesday for some strong long period E/NE swell originating from the Tropical South Pacific. 

What a good year it’s been, eh?