What the fuck is up with using kilojoules to tell us how powerful the waves we're riding are? How energetic they are. Who ordered that? What fuckwit sat down one day and said, "Y'know, I think I'll just baffle the holy living shit out of em' by throwing this kilojoules motherfucker in their faces, and that'll cause 'em to think I'm a really wonderful and really smart kinda guy."
Probably the same fuckwit who decided to start talking about surfboards using liters for volume as if the kook-ass motherfucker was ever going to benefit in the slightest by looking at his surfboard that way. Learn to surf, kook, and lose the liters while you're doing it. Ditto the fucked-up kilojoules.
So ok. It's about energy somehow. What is energy, anyway?
Energy gets measured in "Joules." It also gets measured using a whole bunch of other designations, like watts, calories, horsepower, and plenty of other ones too, but our Kook-ass Surf Overlords in the self-designated Surf Media Capital of the World have decided to use kilojoules (thousands of joules). So ok Overlord Assholes, we're gonna dig in, using your own fucked-up energy measurement unit, and we're going to beat you at your own fucking game with it.And, needless to say, if you're looking around for your self-designated Surf Media Capital of the World, it can only be found somewhere in the United States of America, of course, and I'll let you figure it out on your own from there, and if you're still having trouble with it, I would strongly suggest that you follow the money, 'cause money will always lead you directly to the beating heart of whatever lies and bullshit you're trying to neutralize, in your efforts to get to the truth somehow.
Nobody actually understands any of these energy-measurement-designations on a gut level, except for a very few people working in technical fields where precise understanding of energy is mandatory, to keep from blowing the whole place up, if your energy-level maybe kind of gets away from you some.
Lovely. What the fuck does any of that even mean?
1 Joule is the amount of work required to lift one kilogram of weight (2.2 pounds for you culturally-retarded Americans out there), one meter (1.1 yards for you culturally-retarded Americans out there) high. A kilojoule is thousand of that. A small car might weigh 1,000 kilograms. Maybe an old VW Beetle from back in the the 1960's with some hippies inside of it hauling a few pounds of pot they're gonna be selling at the Grateful Dead concert they're going to. Lift that thing one meter up off the ground, and you've just burned one KILOJOULE doing it. A fair bit of work, eh?
Well isn't that just fucking wonderful.
A kilojoule of energy gets you a thousand kilograms lifted one meter.
So ok. So what gives a swell its energy?
There are two contributors to swell energy: kinetic energy from the simple movement, in any and all directions, of the water, and gravitational potential energy from the water somehow having been raised higher than it originally was, against the force of the earth's gravity.Both of these sources of energy can be calculated from the tangible and familiar metrics of swell height and period.
Yadda yadda yadda. Who gives a shit?
The total wave energy is the sum of the energy of each bit of water which makes up our wave, but only that part of the wave that we're interested in, and the sneaky bastards in the self-designated Surf Media Capital of the World have randomly decided to take a segment of the oncoming wave-front of unspecified size, as a standardized baseline they're using for all the rest of these worse-than-useless calculations. (And actually, it's even worse than that, because it looks very much as if they are further doctoring things up with additional undisclosed fudge-factors depending on which surfspot they're talking about.)
Swell Gravitational Potential Energy:
At any instant, an ocean wave has some degree of height, and will therefore have potential energy which is given to it from the earth's gravity. Gravity can swiftly endow a given volume of water raised into the air above us, into an unpleasantly-energetic thing possessed of the power to righteously beat our ass when it falls on us.
Gravitational potential energy of a given volume of water in a wave (Perhaps a cubic meter? More? Less? It all depends.) is calculated by multiplying the mass of the given volume of water by its height above some given elevation like perhaps still-water sea level, or the level of the flat water out in front of a falling lip, or perhaps just your very-unlucky head down there beneath that falling lip, and then by the strength of gravity at earth's surface. Mass times gravitational acceleration tells us how much potential energy we're dealing with, ok?
As each bit of water in a wave has a different height, for the purposes of coming up with our bullshit kilojoules, this calculation is performed over the full volume of the wave in deep water, keeping in mind that to get our volume we're gonna have to arbitrarily decide to use a standardized segment of the wave-front which we're interested in. Pick a different arbitrary length of wave-front, and the kilojoules, and everything else, goes immediately to hell by altering itself in a random way, rendering the whole exercise just as stupid as it actually is, even if we hadn't done that.
The total gravitational potential energy of a wave is the sum of the potential energy of each bit of water in a wave, but again, you gotta pick how much length of the oncoming wave-front you want to use, pretty much at random, and from then and forever more, you must stay with that chosen length of oncoming wave-front, or otherwise the whole thing goes down the flusher, which really, is where it all belongs anyway, but we find ourselves dealing with this gobbledygook crap, so we must therefor soldier on with it. Sigh.
Wave Kinetic Energy:
Each water molecule in a wave also has kinetic energy from its motion. Kinetic energy is (1/2) times the mass, times the square of velocity (Don't ask. It's physics. Leave it alone. Just accept this one for what it is and keep moving forward with things, ok?). This applies to each molecule of water in the wave separately because each one of them has a separate and different velocity plus a separate and different direction of travel (And you purists back there in the back of the room can just sit right back down and shut the fuck up while you do so, because I already know that, by definition velocity includes direction of travel, and I'm not talking to you assholes anyway, I'm trying to help out all these other nice people, so maybe you try to be nice, too, ok?). The total kinetic energy of the wave is the sum of all of the kinetic energies of every single molecule of water in the wave all added together.
If you are interested, the formulas for potential, kinetic, and total, energy of a wave are shown below. Note these energies are tied to some ungiven segment of the of oncoming wave-front, and this is where the fucking KILOJOULES comes from, and it's... pretty much bullshit. They just randomly decided to grab a piece of the wave-front, calculate the MASS of the water contained within it, and then multiply that mass times the size and period of the wave, and Hey Presto! out spits our stupid-ass kilojoules.
The University of Hawaii at Manoa, who constitute a worthy resource with digging to the bottom of this stuff, tells us the following:
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A wave with a height of 2 m and a wavelength of 14 m breaking along 2 km of coastline (surface area = 32,000 m2) has approximately 45 kWh of energy. This is roughly equivalent to one gallon of gasoline, which contains about 160 million (1.6 x 108) joules (J) of energy.
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And since they're honest about it, they've told us that they're using a 2 kilometer-long segment of the oncoming wave front, to make their calculation with. We must have that wave-front segment size, or otherwise everything else turns into complete-nonsense rubbish.
So ok. So formulas are made out of Math. Math is filled with lingo. Here's the lingo for the formulas we used today.
Wave Height (H)
Taller waves have more mass, and that mass moves faster for a given period. The end result is energy increases by the square (which is what that little 2 above and to the right of the H for height in our formula means) of wave height, meaning doubling wave height creates a fourfold increase in energy. Triple the wave height, and squaring that makes for a ninefold increase in wave energy, and this shit gets out of hand rapidly, lemme tell you.
Wave Period (T)
Longer period waves move faster and have more mass per given wave height, resulting in an increase of kinetic and potential energy. This result also increases by the square (same deal as with the H for height, and the little 2 above and to the right of the T for time is telling us this), but this time it's the square of the wave period, where doubling of the wave period quadruples the energy of an individual wave.
Gravitational Force (g)
This is what's making falling things fall, and the farther they fall the faster they fall, so try to stay away from the place where that shit's gonna be landing, every chance you get, ok? It too, gets squared, which is why the longer things fall, the faster they fall.
Pi (π)
Waves are cyclical things, and the water in them moves in circles, and whenever you go to try and measure anything involving circles you get fucked-up π, and this ain't geometry class, so if you have a need to dig further into why π, go right ahead, and you're on your own with it 'cause you ain't getting anything more about fucked-up π outta me with this one.
And I saved the best one for last.
Rho (ρ)
Looks like a little letter 'p', but it ain't. It's Greek letter Rho, instead. Mathguy is madly in love with the Greek alphabet, and he's gone and done a bunch of weird shit with it, assigning definitions to a lot of the letters in that alphabet, and for ρ, he tends to assign either density, or just simply a variable to that letter, and this is where Captain Bullshit, leader of our Kook-ass Surf Overlords, has pulled a fast one on us, deliberately not telling us what he's assigning to ρ in this instance. And of course without it, NONE of the rest of this stuff makes any sense at all, and since he's hiding it from us behind ρ, that lets him put on the Wizard Suit, stand up in the front of the room, and act all wise and mysterious about all this crap, and most of the fools in the audience will lap that shit up like a kitten lapping up a saucer filled with milk. That little "ρ" is where he's buried his arbitrary grab of the oncoming wave-front, coupled it to the density of water, and then tossed in additional never-to-be-disclosed fudge factors, and once again... fuck Captain Bullshit, fuck the Kook-ass Surf Overlords, and may the next wave in this set drown the unworthy sonofabitches, and remove them from our lives forever more.
But it's all a crock full of steaming wet shit anyway, so fuhgeddaboudit.
Longer period equals more energy.
More size equals more energy.
Three feet at 8 seconds contains less energy than three feet at 18 seconds. 3 at 8 is a much smaller wave beneath your surfboard than 3 at 18.
Three feet at 8 seconds contains less energy than 6 feet at 8 seconds. 3 at 8 is a much smaller wave beneath your surfboard than 6 at 8.
Like... duh, what's the big deal with this stuff?
It's no problem for anybody except for those fucks who have been educated beyond the level of their intelligence.
Fuck those idiots.
And fuck their goddamned kilojoules too.
And if all of the above isn't enough, consider that when they crushed Size and Period into... turns and spits disgustedly on the ground... kilojoules, they took our Swell Period away from us.
Maybe give that one some thought.
Maybe give the fact that longer-period waves will refract more than shorter-period waves containing an equal amount of energy, as they encounter shallower and shallower water when they're approaching the shoreline. They will bend around more, trying to face more squarely into the shoreline they're approaching, than their shorter-period equal-energy brethren.
Difference in refraction equals difference in the exact direction the wave is coming in from, just before it breaks.
And everybody knows that differing directions make for differing characteristics of how a wave will break at any given location.
Throw a west swell at Pipeline, and you get Pipeline.
Throw a north swell at Pipeline, and Pipeline disappears. Poof, and it's gone!
The differences in the direction a wave is approaching a surfspot from are absolutely critical in knowing how one of those waves will break, good, bad, or otherwise, when it gets there.
And they took a healthy chunk of that away from us when they decided they were going to from-now-on be shoving kilo-fucked-up-joules down our throats.
So ok. So you live somewhere. And the waves that break at Somewhere are arriving with size, period, and direction.
Change any one of those three factors, and the breaking wave will change. Drastically, many times.
So, for you locals at Somewhere, start paying attention to Swell size, period, and direction.
If you have a nearby buoy, then get hip to that shit, and start giving the buoy some time and attention, every day.
Then use the memory that The Little Baby Jeesus Up In The Sky gave you, to correlate what the buoy was saying for any given day, with what the waves were doing at Somewhere on that same given day. Day after day after day after day.
In time, you will develop a remarkably-accurate feel for what the waves will be doing Somewhere, just based on looking at the buoy, and nothing more than that. And you will have also given yourself an Unfair Advantage over all the other dingdongs surfing Somewhere, who chose to not Learn The Ways Of The Buoy (they're lazy, they don't want to do the work), by being able to figure that shit out, better than any of the rest of them, and continually be dancing away laughing, as the stupid fucks keep trying to use you as their personal Bird Dog, always winding up where the waves were good yesterday, but never winding up where the waves are good today.
Or you could just go ask that asshole on the internet who's wearing a Wizard Suit what to do. He'll want money of course, and he might not be nearly as accurate about things as he claims to be, but...
...you'll feel so much better, knowing that you were giving your hard-earned cash to a Real Wizard, instead of some person or other who's lived Somewhere for her whole life, and has been closely watching things the whole time, 'cause...
If she really was smart, she'd be wearing a Wizard Suit too, right?
Right.
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