Playa Rio Mar • Statistics for January

January: Trade-Wind Slop and Rare Southern Windows

The surf year starts with the trade-wind machine in full force. The wind rose is strikingly one-sided, with NNW flow accounting for over 80 percent of all wind and N/NNE making up the rest, creating mostly offshore to cross-offshore conditions during the first half of the day. The swell story is less encouraging: 72 percent of the incoming energy arrives from the N, NNE, and NNW quadrants, with only a small 17 percent slice of the spectrum from the preferred SSW/SW/WSW/S directions. The average swell height is 2.6 feet (0.8m) and the average period is just 7.7 seconds, so most surf is short-period windswell -- punchy but bumpy. Water temperature is warm at 27.6°C, air temperatures average 25.5°C, and precipitation is low at 0.69 mm/day. When a proper SSW groundswell does align with the offshore NNW breeze, the beach can light up with clean 3 foot (1m) waves, but those windows are rare in January.