Southern Tasmania Surf Forecast by Craig Brokensha (issued Wednesday 18th November)

Best Days: Sunday onwards

Recap

A kick in new SW swell due yesterday looks to have not really provided much size with tiny 1-1.5ft waves across Clifton with N/NE winds, favouring more exposed breaks. Today the swell has faded back to 1ft with morning offshores ahead of SE sea breezes.

This week and next (Nov 19 - 27)

It'll be a slow end to the week with no decent swell at all due into tomorrow or Friday with a small possible S/SE swell from a trough moving across us being too quick to generate any major size.

From Saturday afternoon and more so Sunday we're looking at a very active period due to two strong nodes of the Long Wave Trough move through our region from Friday through next week.

The first node will be quite zonal, directing a vigorous polar frontal progression from the south-east Indian Ocean, along the polar shelf and up towards and past us during the coming days and weekend.

An initial change linked to this progression on Saturday should kick up a late increase in SW windswell to 2ft or so, with the groundswell proper filling in Sunday and building to a strong 3-5ft later in the day (smaller 3ft through the morning).

A secondary embedded low in the progression on Sunday should produce a reinforcing W/SW swell for Monday coming in at 3ft. We'll then see the swell drop back into Tuesday morning ahead of the second phase.

This second phase will see a second and more pronounced node of the LWT moving across us, which will see the polar frontal activity steered more up into Vicco and not as favourably through our swell window.

Still a vigorous and slow moving multi-centred polar low should move through our swell window generating plenty of W/SW swell for us into the middle to end of next week. More on this Friday though.

Back to the winds for Sunday onwards and we should see W/NW breezes all day Sunday NW tending W/SW breezes on Monday, holding from the NW all day Tuesday. W/NW to W/SW breezes look to persist the rest of the week, but we'll go over this Friday.