In winter, at the coast of China, the direction of swells is generally different from that of the winds, but we could not find the generation area of these coastal swells on the weather map. In this paper, the differences between the ‘coastal swells’ and the other swells are studied, and we realize that the ‘coastal swells’ are developed from the wind waves after refraction near the shore or developed from the coastvvard component of the wind waves.