Sydney, Hunter and Illawarra Surf Forecast by Ben Matson (issued Wednesday 26th December)

Best Days: Entire period: plenty of local NE swell from Thurs thru' Tues (biggest Sat/Sun), though with tricky winds. Sat thru' next Sat: extended run of fun (building) trade swell, biggest towards the end of the week. 

Recap: We’ve seen plenty of E’ly swell over the last two days, with size around 3ft Tuesday morning, easing slightly into the afternoon ahead of a kick in longer period E’ly swell overnight that provided occasional 3ft+ sets this morning. Winds have been moderate NE through the afternoons but the mornings have seen light N’ly winds and clean conditions. 

Fun peaky E'ly swell at Manly this morning

This week (Dec 27 - 28)

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Our current E’ly swell will ease steadily through Thursday. 

Early winds should be light, but a stationary high pressure system in the Tasman Sea has set up a lengthy spell of NE winds (which we’ve seen established over the last few days), and they’ll strengthen throughout the day. 

As such, the easing E’ly swell will be replaced by building NE windswell, which should hold around 2ft for most of Thursday up to 2-3ft very late in the day, before nudging a little higher into Friday. 

Friday’s winds look a little more robust out of the NE though, so there’s a fair chance we’ll see a much reduced window of lighter winds, if it eventuates at all.

South facing beaches will handle the wind a lot better both days, but they’ll be tiny under the swell direction. Though, early Thursday should still see some small lingering E'ly swell. 

This weekend (Dec 29 - 30)

Our existing stationary high pressure system will maintain fresh NE winds across the region for much of the weekend.

A series of small troughs off the Far South Coast may push just far enough north to influence the local winds (north of the Illawarra) on Sunday afternoon, but for now expect the nor’easters to dominate proceedings both days.

The good news is that we’ll see plenty of locally-sourced NE swell all weekend, generally in the 3-4ft range. By Friday we should be in a much better position to identify small windows of opportunity for the best conditions - but for now, expect it to be bumpy on the surface.

Next week (Dec 31 onwards)

The weekend’s NE windswell will ease slightly into Monday but persist around 2-3ft into Tuesday, before abating throughout the second half of the week.

A series of migrating low pressure systems in the Southern Ocean look poorly aligned for our region so at the moment, I’m not expecting any south swell throughout the forecast period (short, medium or long term).

However, a broadening trade flow from the Coral Sea way out into the Far South Pacific will set up an extended run of E’ly swell for Northern NSW, which will tend more E/NE in our region and provide fun waves for Southern NSW quite some time.

We may see the first new signs of this over the weekend (sitting underneath the local NE windswell) but it’ll become the dominant swell train through much of next week, with size likely to ebb and flow in the 2-3ft range at open beaches.

Also worth mentioning at this point is an active phase of the Madden–Julian Oscillation (MJO) across the top end of the country. This is expected to result in the development of one or two (or more!) Tropical Cyclones in the Coral Sea and South Pacific next week. Of course, this is a very long time away and also quite a remote area of our swell window, but it will ensure that these Forecast Notes will be keeping a close eye on this region for the next couple of weeks.

More in Friday’s update!

PS: the image below shows computer model output for next Thursday.. that's seven potential tropical cyclones - or tropical depressions - plus a small sub-tropical low in the South Pacific below Tahiti.. this specific scenario won't eventuate, but it certainly suggests we're in for a very active period in the tropics.