Weather Forecasting

In the US there are so many weather resources readily available. For the mariner it is as easy as tuning the VHF radio to nearest NOAA weather station. NOAA continuously broadcast marine and other weather products. Once you leave the US it is a whole different story. Our principal means of getting good reliable weather information is our SSB radio. Chris Parker provides weather and routing information each morning (except Sundays) for the Bahamas and the entire Caribbean. Chris is a sailor and broadcast from his Morgan 34 'Bel Ami' in Florida. Equally important to us are our GRIB (Gridded Binary Data) files which we download daily for our geographic area. These are data files from forecasting models. We use the GFS (Global Forecasting System) which is NOAA's forecasting model. There are other models that we sometimes use such as WW3, which is a forecast of ocean wave dynamics. We view this data with GRIB Explorer from OCENS. A GRIB file contains a lot of data and presentation is important for the analysis. We download barometric pressure, wind, wave and precipitation at 6 hours intervals for the next few days, usually five. There are longer forecast times frames, but the accuracy deteriorates significantly. With Chris Parker's forecast, particularity his synoptic forecast, and the GRIB files we usually have a high confidence levels in the forecast for the next 2 - 3 days. The nice benefit of weather forecasting is that you can evaluate the forecast accuracy fairly quickly.


The screen print of a recent GRIB file shows the Abacos, outlined in white. Our position is the red cross. Wind barbs show the wind direction and speed at 2 pm. The solid lines are barometric pressure and the dashed lines are wave height.


Double click on the picture to get a better view