South Australian Surf Forecast (Fri 24th Jan)

South Australian Forecast (issued Friday 24th January)

Best Days: Sunday morning, Monday morning, Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning on the Mid

Recap

Lighter E/NE winds and a boost in S/SW swell to 3ft offered fun waves across the South Coast yesterday morning. The Mid Coast remained tiny but clean.

A shallow change moved in before dawn this morning and has since strengthened creating poor conditions across both coasts.

This weekend (Jan 25-26 onwards)

The trough responsible for today's onshore change will strengthen overnight, with a strong fetch of S/SE winds expected to be aimed into the South Coast. This will kick up a poor S/SE windswell that will then ease into Sunday as winds ease due to a high pressure system moving in from the west.

This should see winds going around to the NE Sunday morning with a fun mix of easing S/SE windswell and S/SW groundswell.

Next week onwards (Jan 27 onwards)

There'll be fun clean waves at exposed spots early next week with small to tiny amounts of swell and offshore N'ly winds (they may become a touch strong into Tuesday though, blowing out the waves with the minimal amounts of swell).

There's a couple of good pulses of W/SW and SW groundswell expected into next week, generated by a couple of strong mid-latitude fronts firing up south-west of WA and pushing towards us.

The strongest is expected to produce a peak in swell Friday afternoon (bottom right). Unfortunately winds will become a problem with fresh SE winds from Wednesday through Thursday and then lighter SE winds Friday. The Mid Coast should offer better waves to an inconsistent 1-2ft wave Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning from the initial W/SW swell (above right), above model forecasts.

We'll confirm this Monday.