We all want to sail in nice weather of course. Contemporary weather forecasting provides very accurate forecasts for up to a week ahead. Now we have Internet easily available on charter yachts throughout the mediterranean, the luxury of Internet weather onboard has finally arrived.

Types of Forecast

Text Forecasts:

Site such as the BBC weather service produce text based forecasts daily for many places around the planet.

Graphical Forecasts:

These fall in two major categories. The fixed image forecast, traditionally used for weather radar images and the more recent GRIB based forecasts.

GRIB which stands for Gridded Binary is an automated service provided by America offer twice daily forecasts for the entire planet using data acquired from weather buoys and other electronic weather sources. A key feature is the raw data is not modified by experienced weather forecasters, something often cited by weather forecasters as it’s main limitation. The whole world data is uploaded twice daily and then downloaded by major weather data users who in turn allow you download sections (hence the Grid) as required for up to seven days in three hour chunks. The data grid is broken down to a spot forecast every half a degree or approximately 30 miles.

We offer all three three types of forecast on each page of our sailing area pages. Our personal experience is that Grib files are the most accurate for up to 24-36 hours.