Few things in the world of surf forecasting elicit the visceral reaction that a ‘purple blob’ does when LOLA indicates it is aimed at your local break. The average surfer might not know exactly how big it’s gonna be or the precise arrival time just from looking at the chart but they usually realize one thing… “It’s gonna be pumping soon!”
A recent addition to the Surfline suite of forecast tools is that our significant wave height charts (purple blob charts) now go all the way back to 1979. If our team is curious about what the storm looked like that created the huge swell for the North Shore in January 1998 or the Code Red Tahiti swell in 2011, we can now find it.
With this in mind, our Forecast Team picked a few of our favorite purple blobs from the last few decades.
North Pacific:
The North Pacific has countless purple blob candidates, so it’s not an easy task to select just one. However, a favorite for us was the NW swell that slammed Hawaii on Feb 8th, 2013.
South Pacific:
This was the swell that spawned Mike Stewart’s incredible journey, with Sean Collins’ forecast expertise, from Tahiti to Hawaii to California and eventually Alaska in mid- to late-July 1996.
Gulf of Mexico:
This purple blob belongs to Hurricane Rita, of the record breaking 2005 Atlantic tropical season. It was the Gulf of Mexico’s most intense cyclone to date, rapidly strengthening on a track through the Florida Straits into the Gulf. Rita blossomed from tropical storm status to major Category-5 hurricane in around a day and a half, peaking in intensity through the wee hours of the morning on September 22nd.
Atlantic:
The appropriately named winter storm ‘Hercules’ took LOLA to a whole new level: from purple to platinum. This mammoth storm was the most impressive of the North Atlantic winter 2013-2014 season, one that will go down in European and North African surfer’s memory banks as an all time classic.
South Atlantic:
This one just looks pretty to us. With all due respect to some of the platinum blobs on this list, there is just something appealing about all that pink and purple that occurred just off the tip of Africa in late-August 2005.
Indian:
Pound for pound, the most cyclonically active ocean in the world, so you better believe the Indian Ocean brought its ‘A’ game to qualify as a Surfline Forecast Team favorite purple blob.
