FREE Weather Info

[Mike Garside]

As a newcomer to RIBnet I've already gotta lotta help, both directly and indirectly from users of this forum and would like to offer some in return to others.

There's not yet a great deal I can say on ribs and ribbing itself but with a few ocean sailing miles in my wake perhaps I can on other aspects of seamanship. Weather is one.

There's not a great deal that the Met Office gives away free on-line but the Inshore Forecast is a good first port of call for local tactical planning. On-line has the advantage that you don't need the spit second timing of listening on the radio. I ALWAYS doze off again just at the sritical moment! Go to...

www.meto.gov.uk/datafiles/inshore.html

To plan ahead up to 7 days there is an excellent site that is currently being redesigned. It's run by the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts. The bit I use is the 3 to 6 day forecasts for the Atlantic and Europe which feature the UK in the centre of the chart. Go to ...

www.ecmwf.int

...and click on the icon (a string of mini maps) below the heading Deterministic Medium Range Forecast Charts. This will bring up the chart for 3 days ahead and by scrolling through the list on the left of the map, you can get detail for days 4,5, and 6 to come.

Each chart shows the sea level pressure and and wind speed. You need to understand how wind direction is determined by highs and lows in the northern hemisphere. None of it's rocket science but if anyone out there is not sure how to interpret the info I will be happy to help.

There's a whole bunch more stuff out there from web sites all over the world but this will do to start with. For UK ribsters, at least. If you are interested I'll pass on some more, including a magic one which a select few of the ocean racers have discovered and which is making the job of weather routers pretty much obsolete!

In the meantime, if any of you have got favourite free weather sites, perhaps you might like to share them?

[Brian]

Thhe weather is vitally important to us of course.
I like looking at what the sea conditions actually are if possible. I am not bright enough to work out what it will probably be like. I therefore am a fan of webcams, like this one at Oban where some of us are going soon:

http://www.camvista.com/scotland/highlands/oban.php3

I have also seen demonstrated, but cannot provide a web address for, of bouys which transmit windspeed, waveheight etc to a website.
You can pick a bouy on your planned route, click on it and checkout the local sea conditions. Sounds neat to me.

[Keith Hart]

Brian is this the one you were looking for:

http://buoyweather.com

I'm still checking out the picture!

Keith (on the case) Hart

[Mike C]

http://www.onlineweather.com/v4/uk/sailing/index.html is very good too. Has link to Admiralty tide time too!

[seafariskye]

Ref all the above, have spent ages looking for a decent weather site, not this getting 3 and making an average of them!! gets very tiring,I get on very well with this site, and is pretty spot on, you can go for the all important windspeed or rain/cloudcover images, and can even get it to predict, on a moving screen image.
The address is a bit bizarre, but when you go onto it, click on the nearest main town to you

http://theyr.com/cg/cny/Ifb350/F=js*...scot_Stornoway

Main thing that got me was, i am quite a bit away from stornoway, so only use the 3 charts on the left as a rough guide...
BUT remember to watch those nice wee arrows over where you are.

Cheers

Pete

Just realised, to get the whole thing you will have to copy the whole address, then paste it onto your toolbar, when you get your area sorted, bookmark it and go there whenever you want

[Keith Hart]

Here is another one for the list. Looks interesting:

http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/Maps/United_Kingdom.shtml

Keith Hart

[Mike Garside]

Yes, Keith, that's a goodee and has long been one of my book-marked sites. It is very useful, particularly if you look at the recent historical data from a chosen buoy. That way you can see the local weather trend.

Here's the most remarkable site of all. It gives live wind speed and direction for the whole globe. It is produced by (I believe a polar orbiting) satellite called QUIKSCAT.

The few ocean racers that know about it find it invaluable because it shows them exactly what the wind is doing ahead of them.

Just as importantly, because they know where their competitors are (they get that info by email every few hours from race HQ), they know what weather the opposition has. That way they can react to cover the situation.

If Alan Priddy could download that info it would also be enormously useful to him as well. By taking a route to the South of the (usually quite small) centre of a depression ahead of him, he would have following seas.

Going North of the centre will give seas on the nose. The opposite applies in the Southern hemisphere. Unfortunately, even though he has an Iridium cellphone, I gather they are not set up to download from the internet. Shame.

Anyway, here is the site...

http://manati.wwb.noaa.gov/quikscat/

Scroll down the page to one of two chartlets - the Ascending or Descending pass of the satellite. Click on a square that interests you and you get a nice little map that gives you wind - LIVE! Amazing stuff.