Western Australia Surf Forecast by Craig Brokensha (issued Wednesday 13th December)

Best Days: Thursday morning, early Friday keen surfers across the South West

Recap

Poor waves yesterday and this morning across the South West, while Mandurah offered a touch more size for a novelty surf, similar in Perth.

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This week and weekend (Dec 14 - 17)

Today's small lift in swell was generated by the initial stages of a relatively weak frontal system moving in from the west the last few days.

This frontal progression produced a better fetch of strong W/SW winds in our south-western swell window the last couple of days, generating a fun SW swell for tomorrow morning.

Margs should hopefully come in around 4-5ft+ across the magnets, with continuing 1-1.5ft sets to the north.

Conditions should be clean with a light SE tending E/SE breeze across all locations before sea breezes kick in, SE tending S/SE and then S/SW on Friday as the swell eases.

Saturday morning should be clean again with a light SE wind, but there'll be no major size left across the coast.

A strengthening W'ly change will develop through the day and this will be linked to a strong cold front approaching from the south-west, combining with an inland surface trough resulting in the formation of a deep and powerful low.

This low will be quite significant and the models are converging on it being positioned south-southwest of our South West before drifting slowly north-east while weakening.

Severe-gale to possibly storm-force S/SW veering SW winds will be aimed in our swell window, generating oversized and stormy SW swell that will build Sunday and peak Monday morning.

It's hard to put a size-range on the the swell at this stage, but we're looking at waves in the vicinity of 10-12ft in the South West and 4ft further north though with strong onshore winds.

Through early next week the low is expected to weaken and move off to the east, but onshore winds look to persist until Wednesday as the swell fades. More on all of this Friday.