Weather and tides........ Best place to get of the Internet

[Paul1972stevens]

Hey there it's me again..... What Web sites do you all use to get the best weather reports for the south of England and tides as well.. Very intrest to see what you all come back with.

 

[pvb]

I find XC Weather is fairly useful for wind forecasting - www.xcweather.co.uk

I get tidal data on my plotter.

 

[{151760}]

http://weatheronline.co.uk
is good.
I use the WeatherTrack app on my iPad, along with Tucano's TidesPlanner which integrates with Imray's chart plotter software.

 

[lpdsn]

Hey there it's me again..... What Web sites do you all use to get the best weather reports for the south of England and tides as well.. Very intrest to see what you all come back with.

For tides you can use Easytide, which is an Admiralty website. They do the next seven days for free. Very comprehensive coverage.

http://www.ukho.gov.uk/easytide/EasyTide/SelectPort.aspx

You can also use the POL website to get tides at selected locations for the next 30 days. They also give real time information and surge model predictions if you're interested in a bit more detail on how the tides might vary from the predictions.

http://www.ntslf.org/tides/predictions

There's also Dover tide tables, that are available online for years to come. I've lost the link, but it was a cross-channel swimmers' website. Beware that standard time differences based on Dover are pretty approximate. Ok for outline planning, but don't bet your life or your race strategy on them.

In terms of weather, it really depends what you want.

You can get the official forecast from www.metoffice.gov.uk. Unfortunately it has gone a bit nanny state in recent years, where they over state things a wee bit, causing yachtsman to take off a fiddle factor to get the most likely wind speed. One day it is going to go badly wrong.

www.xcweather.co.uk just shows the model outputs (in this case the American GFS model). Meteorologist do just use this as the basis of their forecasts. If you use the model directly, you're replacing their expertise with your own. It's what I prefer to do, feeling confident (arrogant) enough to trust my own judgement, but if I get it wrong I know I can only blame myself.

If using a model, you really need to use several and consider the differences between them to form a judgement. The ECMWF (UK/EU) model is available on the Met Eireann website, but only covering Ireland and the Irish Sea. I don't know of a source covering Southern England.

You could also use Wind Guru. You're relying on an unknown amateur meterologist to interpret the model. Some of them are very good, and some are **** with all points between. For that reason I'm wary of just taking their answer and I've had a couple of cases where they've been pretty wrong, so I tend to avoid them now.

 

[alahol2]

In and around the Solent I have found the Windfinder Superforecast to be the most accurate.

 

[afterpegassus]

Hey there it's me again..... What Web sites do you all use to get the best weather reports for the south of England and tides as well.. Very intrest to see what you all come back with.

xc as others have mentioned for weather (and occasionally Magic seaweed).
For tides I use Total Tide which came on a disc off ebay and has served me well for quite a few years now - ok, only indirectly from a website.

 

[RogerMayne]

http://www.tides4fishing.com/uk

 

[ronsurf]

I use Metcheck https://www.metcheck.com/UK/

For the South Coast, Channel Coast Observatory has a large number of buoys that give you current wind, pressure and wave data. The buoys are inshore, around 500m to 1km offshore.

 

[stu9000]

Tidal info i get from the Navionics app on nexus 7 tablet.

I have found these weather sites very useful.

I use* for wind up to 7 days ahead* :***http://www.windfinder.com/weather-maps/forecast/unitedkingdom#5/55.379/-3.428







In the last day or so Met office inshore :**http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/public/weather/marine-inshore-waters/#?tab=map


For rain :**http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/2638081


Many others to confirm general picture including:*
Yr.no
http://www.xcweather.co.uk/

http://www.windguru.cz/int/index.php?sc=47926




▶ Show quoted text

 

[Ian_Edwards]

I use, from a laptop with WIFI:

XCweather http://www.xcweather.co.uk/
Met Office http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/
Magic seaweed http://http://magicseaweed.com/
Franks Weather: http://weather.mailasail.com/Franks-Weather/Weather-Charts-On-The-Internet

More or less in that order.

If the WIFI is slow or I'm on the limit as far as range is concerned, XCweather and Franks WEather are good, they seem to require less bandwidth. Whilst the Met Office site is so heavy on bandwidth, it more or less impossible to use unless I have good solid WIFI signal.

On my iPhone I use XCweather, or the Met Office mobile site, but again the Met Office site is heavy on bandwidth and on GSM/GPRS it often won't load unless I have a full mobile signal, which can be hard to find in the remoter parts of NW Scotland. 3G and 4G are just a dream outside the a few big centres of population.

My impression is that over the years the weather forecast have got more accurate, but it's got harder to access them from remote locations, mainly because the websites have more bells and whistles and so need a higher speed link to download. They are designed for 20 Mbps not 56 kbps (if you're lucky)

 

[AliM]

You say the south of England. Have a look at the French forecasts as well. The reason is that then you get genuinely independent data and interpretation of it. Several of the above recommendations use the GFS data, and model, so they may look independent, but are not really. The met office and the French lot each generate their own observational data and computer models from that, many of the other sites use GFS but some level of their own interpretation, or in some cases, no human interpretation at all.

We sail in the East coast and Baltic, so I use the national met office predictions for the country we are in, plus the equivalent for the neighbouring countries and add in Windguru or xcweather. (Eg in Denmark, I would use german, danish and swedish met offices+ Windguru) if all that lot agree, then you can be pretty confident, if they differ, you know to be cautious.

 

[DipperToo]

Using the internet, Meteo Consult have a marine section which has tides, GRIB, forecasts etc. http://marine.meteoconsult.co.uk/shipping-forecast/weather-forecast-inshore.php

I also use their APP on Android (Meteo Consult). There was a bug last year in that tidal times seemed to be based on French local time, but on a check recently that seems to be OK now - lets see when the clocks change if it stays on GMT or moves....

Also XC Weather is good.

 

[davidej]

I think the best plan is to look at 3 or four forecasts. Then if one give a good forecast and the other three or four bad, then obviously you go with that one.

 

[[70521]]

The Met Office

Meto France

Tides 4 fishing

But, I usually work everything off the published Dover tides. Being old and wanting to do things the old way.

 

[KellysEye]

Another one for wind is www.grib.us with an option of 5 or 7 days. For tides http://www.wxtide32.com/download.html

 

[Len Ingalls]

http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-6.59,49.54,929

 

[lpdsn]

I think the best plan is to look at 3 or four forecasts. Then if one give a good forecast and the other three or four bad, then obviously you go with that one.

You can actually do that in the North Channel where the inshore weather forecasts overlap. I've never known the Met Office disagree with themselves by more the five points on the Beaufort scale for the same bit of water (F3 Vs F8).

 

[Len Ingalls]

You can actually do that in the North Channel where the inshore weather forecasts overlap. I've never known the Met Office disagree with themselves by more the five points on the Beaufort scale for the same bit of water (F3 Vs F8).

Over here on the Left Side,we take the km/h & read it directly as knots! 20k = 20kts.etc.