Weather
Sources of weather and oceanographic data
These are the main sources of data used by the sailing community and are all available in Expedition. In addition, much data is feely available on the internet.
Expedition
Saildocs
Squid
Sailflow
Important note
Whilst racing, services such as routing or weather data that is not free of charge or easily available to all boats are not allowed by Rule 41(c) (outside help) of the RRS. See Case 120 in the Case book.
Case 120 clarifies that rule 41c may be changed for any particular race by the notice of race and sailing instructions.
Some data from the Exp grib server (UM, UKV, Access) is only available to registered Expedition users.
Weather maps and observations
Weather maps, satellite and radar imagery are available from many sources, including MyImage, Rainviewer and Squid in Expedition.
Weather observations are available from many sources, including BOM, NOAA NDBC and SailFlow in Expedition.
ASCAT
EUMetSat and KNMI.
Rainviewer
Windy
Flowx
Ensemble forecasts
Ensemble forecasts are used to help understand uncertainty in forecasts.
Ensemble forecasts consist of a control run and a set of ensemble runs, in which the initial conditions and/or model physics are perturbed from the control run.
On average, each of the perturbed members will have lower skill than the control or deterministic forecast, although any individual forecast might show a higher skill.
ENS is available from Expedition and GEFS is available from Great Circle.
Grib data
Data we have found useful over many years of racing:
Global models
From experience, 0.25° is often a good compromise for global model data offshore
0.5° is usually too coarse, but is an option for slow connections,
0.1° data may be more useful, but file sizes will be larger,
Doubling the resolution will increase file size by about a factor of 4.
Most model data is available 3-4 hours after the main synoptic hours.
ICON is generally available first, followed by GFS, UM and the others.
EC HRES is the last available as it is a medium range model (the M in ECMWF).
See the approximate availability table below.
The Expedition server update status can be queried from within Expedition.
UM-Global
Updated 4x daily at 0.1° resolution to 60 or 168 hours
UK Met Office
GFS
Updated 4x daily at 0.1 or 0.25° to 384 hours
NOAA
ICON
Updated 4x daily at 0.1° resolution to 120 or 180 hours
DWD Germany
GDPS
Updated twice daily at 0.15° resolution to 240 hours
Environment Canada
Arpège
Updated 4x daily at 0.25° resolution to 60, 72 or 102 hours
Météo France
ECMWF HRES & AIFS
Updated 4x daily at 0.25° resolution to 90 or 240 hours, AIFS to 360 hours
ECMWF
Availability
Regional models
Local government high resolution models are generally very good and are usually the default choice.
Expedition also provides WRF simulations, mainly for sailing venues where high resolution forecast data is not available.
Arome
FMI Harmonie
KNMI Harmonie
ICON EU
ICON DE
Lamma
UM-UKV (Unified Model)
WRF
Arome
WRF, Cook Islands
Oceanography
Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS)
Mercator global ocean currents available at 1/12° resolution
Higher resolution data available for North West Europe (NWS), Mediterranean and Iberia to Ireland (IBI)
Mercator global ocean
Mediterranean Sea
Atlantic - European North-West European Shelf
Atlantic - Iberian Biscay Irish
Baltic Sea
Ocean currents and sea temperature, available at 1/12° resolution
NOAA USA
EMC
Wave model
NOAA USA
BSH Baltic & North Sea tidal currents
Barotropic is a source of current and tide data for France
Current Lab is a source of current and tide data
Tidetech is a source of current and tide data
Reanalysis
Copernicus
Copernicus ERA5 hourly data on single levels from 1979 to present
ECMWF
Licences and copyright