Southern Tasmania Forecast (issued Wednesday 9th Jul)

Best Days: Early Thursday, early and later Saturday, Sunday, Monday

Recap

Tiny waves persisted across Clifton yesterday before fading further back to a tiny 0.5-1ft today.

This week (Jul 9 – Jul 11)

An inconsistent but fun increase in W/SW groundswell is still expected tomorrow, generated by a vigorous polar front pushing from just east of Heard Island, up towards WA over the weekend and early this week.

Due to the very large distance between the source of the swell and our coasts there'll be very long waits between sets. Clifton should see 1-2ft sets, but the only issue now looks to be local winds. Early a light W/NW'ly is due, but surf early as a freshening SW'ly is expected to develop through the morning. Friday will be cleaner with a NW tending W/NW breeze but there'll be only tiny 1ft+ waves leftover.

This weekend onwards (Jul 12 onwards)

Our moderate sized pulses of groundswell are still on the cards for the weekend, but the size of the peak has been pulled back a touch and the direction swung a touch more W/SW.

This is due to the frontal activity being mainly aimed towards Victoria, with a weaker trailing front pushing through our prime south-western swell window Saturday.

In any case, this vigorous polar frontal progressions should generate an initial pulse of W/SW groundswell for Saturday afternoon, peaking at 3ft+ or so ahead of a secondary more SW'ly directed swell for Sunday to a similar size.

Winds will be flukey, with an early W/NW'ly expected to swing SW through Saturday morning before possibly tending back to the W/NW through the late afternoon. Sunday looks much better though with W/NW winds likely to persist all day.

Into the start of next week the SW swell should easing levels of SW swell but still in the 2ft+ range, as winds persist from the NW tending W/NW.

Longer term the outlook is good regarding swell, but less so regarding local winds.

There's plenty of W/SW groundswell due through the middle of end of next week as the westerly storm track continues to fire under WA, but a deepening surface trough in the Southern Tasman Sea may see winds go S'ly and become fresh. We'll review all this again on Friday though.