UK Numerical Weather Prediction on-line

Because I rarely look at Weatheronline, I am a year behind the pace in noting that output from the UK Global and the North Atlantic European (NAE) meso-scale versions of the Unified Model are publicly available using a web browser.

Unfortunately, as far as I know, they are not available in GRIB file format. To my mind, that limits their usefulness to sailors because it is not easy to save the forecasts for future reference.  Whether from Saildocs by email, zyGrib or UGrib by FTP, the GFS GRIBs can be saved for easy and quick reference and comparison with other or earlier forecasts.

For those who want something that should be better for the first two days than a global model, eg the GFS, the NAE should be generally better than most other meso-scale forecasts. That is for two reasons.

First, the UK Unified Model is a (maybe the) world leader. Secondly, and to the best of my knowledge, they use much more data than any of the commercial firms that run meso-scale models. All these firms that I have had contact with simply start off by using an analysis that is interpolated from the GFS 1/2  degree output.  A good diagnosis is as important for a weather prognosis as it is for medical one,

The Met Office only runs its NAE to 48 hours. They see no merit in going beyond that because of limitations in predictability of small weather features.

To see the UK Global and NAE output, go to http://www.weatheronline.co.uk/cgi-bin/expertcharts?LANG=en&MENU=0000000000, click on UKMO or NAE respectively. Select Surface Wind on the LHS.

Output from other models can be seen here for comparison.