Blog Archives

Cape Town to Stanley

TIMEZERO weather routing CT to STYA screenshot from TZ Navigator V3 showing some of our past trips (in red) and a couple of sketched in options (in blue). The forecast is long range one paused on 12 August and the little blue boat icon shows our forecast position as if we were following the lower blue track. The coloured blobs show rain and I often include that layer as it shows up the fronts well. Read more ›



What will this tropical weather do?

23:09.61S 135:02.32W

I mentioned before the fact that we had been struggling to get our heads around tropical weather and its forecasting. Last weekend had not just us but every boat in the area studying the weather situation very closely. A tropical depression was coming right over us (TD18F was its label) and as it was our first experience of one we were not sure what to expect.
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Equinoctial Gales

Satellite image from 05:09UTC 05 March 2015

Satellite image from 05:09UTC 05 March 2015

The weather that I spoke about in the last entry materialised almost as forecast but in our sheltered spot didn’t affect us much. We could feel some swell, see the clouds rushing past overhead and of course feel the rain hammering down in the frontal part of the system. Read more ›



Guessing at the weather

We are still sitting out a prolonged period of windy conditions that look set to last for some days to come. I thought that I would write a little about the sources of information that we use to ‘guess’ what weather we ‘might’ get. Here when we talk of weather we generally mean ‘wind’; provided that the wind is favourable what the rest of the “weather” is doing is almost irrelevant. Read more ›



Weather Satellite Reception

Clear day over the Falklands

NOAA 19 visible light image from 7 May 2014

I have had an interest in receiving the images from the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) polar orbiting LEO (Low Earth Orbit) weather satellites for many years now. I have built several different antennas and a couple of receivers over the years and have used a couple of different, commercial, systems at sea. Read more ›



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