Weather

Northern France and Biscay Sections' members may find the Brittany Weather reports a useful facility. The link has been added to the Internet Links pages for NW Europe and Biscay.

PS

Anyone using the Met Office site will be aware that it has changed in appearance. It is possible to  navigate to the marine weather pages, easily, only by using the mega-drop-down menu. On my iPad that disappears before I find Marine. As a whole, to put not too fine a point, it is a dumbed down dog’s dinner for forecast services. Paradoxically, they seem to have made it more easy to find  “technical” pages such as those about weather prediction, climate and other research.

Following a recent news item,  the Met Office MarineCall service ceased at the end of October 2011. Unfortunately, the firm that ran the Marinecall service, Boungiorno, seems to have failed to advise their customers despite being given 6 months warning by the Met Office. 

Many members will have noticed that as well as discontinuing the SMS forecast service, there are now no Marinecall telephone or telefax services. It is still possible to speak to a Met Office forecaster, . There is also an independent forecast service, see the Weatherweb site.

I am not sure where to put  this item but someone can pick it up and run with it.

Those even slower on the uptake than I am may be interested in the zyGrib wind/weather sequence facility. On a zyGrib chart, select a location with the mouse pointer, right click, choose Meteotable. The result will be as the attached picture. Very useful.

GFS GRIB data on the 1/2 degree resoulution Have been  available from Saildocs for some months now. Newly introduved on zyGrib, if you ask for 7 days you will get 8. Presumably, they will amend the menu in time. The app from Weather 4D also has 8 day GFS GRIBs. See http://weather.mailasail.com/Franks-Weather/Grib-Files-Apps

For those into hand-held technology, iGrib is a GRIB file viewer for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. It is being developed by a CA member (S/V Mojo) and is low cost at £2.99.

Further to my “discovery£ that Weatheronline provides the UK Met Office meso-scale wind vectors, I have now found that COAMPS forecasts can be obtained in GRIB format for the Mediterranean, British Isles, Biscay, the North Sea and Scandinavia.