Sent to the Editor: Ecologist Records Weekend Waves at the Jersey Shore from Hurricane Gonzalo

Photo taken by Dr. Kent Mountford from Beachfront in Manasquan on Saturday

Dr. Kent Mountford, a seasonal resident of Manasquan, and Esturarine Ecologist, sent in this photograph that he recorded on Saturday. He perfectly framed a surfer in the shot to show the size of the wave, which he estimates was 13 feet. He writes about his experiences recording wave activity at the shore, and the largest wave he ever recorded:

I’ve been at Manasquan Beach (seasonally) since 1939, and the largest wave I have documented using this similar photo-scaling against a surfer, was 23.7 ft in September 2010. (This is shown on the Manasquan-Belmar Patch Facebook page here; hand-held grab shot and was regrettably fuzzy.)

Waves start to break when they are about 1.3 times the water depth in height (about 18 feet water depth for a wave this big) and they are retarded, as in the provided picture, by offshore winds, which are common after major storms. Water nearshore off the inlet puts depths of 22 feet quite close to the beach, but the “pocket” inside our north jetty creates an offshore sand bar that “surprises” swells approaching the coast at high speed, lumping them up and creating higher waves with alongshore breaks (running south to north) that produce the tubes surfers love.

This also means that claimed “32 foot” waves during “Sandy” are not possiblenear the shoreline. These are actually offshore swells documented by the NOAA sea buoys well outside the surf zone. It keeps us all in balance realizing that even Sandy, during her worst hours (which destroyed my 112 year old cottage) did not have well formed waves like these. This is because onshore (like east to northeast) winds push over the tops of the biggest waves and make storm surf “crumbly”. It was the surge that killed us, by raising those crumbly waves up high enough to over-top the beach (a berm or crest roughly 13 foot high).

-Kent Mountford, PhD, Estuarine Ecologist and Environmental Historian

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