Marie vs. Marie: Still too close to call

For the past two weeks, the entire SoCal surf world has been frothing on a hurricane named Marie aimed our way. Not just because early GFS runs had it making landfall in Southern California and the YouTube clickbaiters had a field day. No, twelve years ago there was another hurricane named Marie, and that one went down as the stuff of legends. Every hurricane swell since has been measured against it, and nothing has topped it.

So when another Marie showed up twelve years later with a real shot at rivaling or beating the first, people took notice.

The thing about surfing and claiming one multi-day swell event was better than another is that even with raw data, it's still subjective. Every spot takes swell differently with only minor tweaks to height, period, and direction. One hurricane can be objectively "bigger" by some number, and some crusty core lord at a random spot (probably Poche) can still accurately claim the other swell was bigger or better. With that in mind, let's look at the numbers so far.

San Clemente Basin (NDBC 46086) is the deep-water read for Orange County / North San Diego County when an EPAC hurricane aims swell at California. It sits in deep ocean water and works as a clean proxy for the overall energy a storm delivers. Waves in the 12 to 13 second period range take about 3 to 4 hours to travel from the buoy to the Dana Point / Newport Beach area.

In the chart above, blue is Marie 2014 (Aug 24 to 29). Pink is Marie 2026 from Friday Sept 4, and we're still plotting her in realtime, about twice an hour.

What's notable is that 2026 Marie had a much more drawn-out ramp, starting two days before the peak (assuming we're at the peak at the time of writing, early Monday morning), while 2014 Marie ramped sharper the day before. The ramp for 2026 has been insane. The last two days of swell were significant by any measure, and it hadn't even peaked yet. It looks like we're finally seeing the peak hit the buoy in the Sunday / Monday overnight hours (as forecast by ECMWF / SpotAlert). We've already hit a max wave height higher than anything 2014 Marie recorded, but the period is about 2 seconds shorter, and that can matter a lot.

In an attempt to get a better apples-to-apples comparison between the Maries, we need to talk about their overall energy. Every buoy reading gives us two important pieces of that picture: how tall the swell is, and how many seconds there are between waves.

Height and period work together. Wave power scales roughly with height squared × period (H² × T). So height matters a lot — doubling it gives you roughly four times the power — but period matters too. A 4 ft @ 18s swell carries about 80% more power through deep water than 4 ft @ 10s.

And if you're a surfer thinking, "yeah, but 4 @ 18 is a completely different animal than 4 @ 10," you're right.

Period becomes especially important as swell approaches the coast. Long-period swell has a much longer wavelength, starts interacting with the bottom in deeper water, and can refract, focus, and shoal very differently. So that difference in deep-water power can turn into a much bigger difference in actual breaking surf.

For some perspective, 4 ft @ 18s carries about the same deep-water wave power as 5.4 ft @ 10s — and depending on the spot, you might still expect the 4 @ 18 swell to produce better or bigger surf.

So to get comparable daily energy totals: for each buoy reading we calculate the wave power moving past the buoy, then add that up over time — basically filling a bucket one scoop at a time. That running total is the day's energy.

We also weight each scoop by the hours until the next reading. That matters because the 2014 buoy data was sampled less frequently than the 2026 data. Without accounting for time, denser readings would artificially produce a bigger total.

The result is kWh/m. That "per meter" isn't the width of the whole ocean — it's a one-meter-wide slice of the wave front, like standing at the buoy and measuring how much energy rolled past a meter-wide gate over the course of the day. Scale that gate as wide as you want and the energy scales with it; we keep it per meter so Marie 2014 and Marie 2026 are comparable at the buoy without caring how wide the swell train is.

What it doesn't tell us is exactly how big that energy became when it hit the reef. Direction, period, bathymetry, tide, and all the usual spot witchcraft determine how efficiently that offshore energy turns into breaking surf at T-Street, Wedge, Newport Point, or anywhere else.

When it's all said and done, whatever happens today (Monday, Sept 7th) is probably how people will compare 2026 to 2014. If the overnight buoy readings manage to hold their level through the day, there will be a much stronger, much more objective claim that 2026 Marie is the new champion.

Stay tuned for another update later tonight. In the meantime, I'm headed out to see what's happening in the ocean.