Year 10 Day 106 More On Weather
13 May 2017 | Simpson Bay Marina, Cole Bay, Sint Maarten
Dave/Mostly Sunny
These last few days have been a little hectic with having our mast removed and dealing with various contractors, running Leu Cat over to FKG and then returning to Simpson Bay Marina. I have also been running back and forth to the two chandleries that are here: Island Water World and Budget Marine. Finally, I have been dealing with a fourth contractor to replace some wiring that runs up the mast to our masthead light. Put on top of that we did not have Internet access while over at FGK and that impacted my ability to capture the weather graphics from www.Windytv.com that I have been using to describe the weather patterns across the North Atlantic in previous blogs.
However, I have been able to capture the most recent weather patterns now and will continue with my discussion of how variable the model results have been as one approaches my May 13th end date. With this discussion, you will now be able to move back in time and see the degree of variability there was as you move further back from this end date of May 13th.
Attached to this blog is the photo of the ECMWF weather model result for today, May 13th. This depicts what the models represents to be the actual weather pattern across the North Atlantic. This model is run in England by an organization that is made up of 34 European states. The photo above this blog is a photo of the GFS model result put out by NOAA. It is the one that I usually rely on as I can get this GRIB file result when we are passage making and do not have access to the Internet and Windytv. I download it using our Iridium GO and access it through our SailMail account. I will post a photo of what this SailMail accessed GRIB file looks like just so you can see what we usually rely on.
If you go back through the recent blogs, you can see the remarkable differences in the predicted weather patterns the more days you are from May 13th. For example, if you look at the May 4 projection, it looks nothing like the actual weather patterns for today. The May 7th and May 8th predictions look more like what is actually there today but there are some differences between them. I regret that I was not able to capture the weather projections between May 9 and 12 but that was when we were scurrying around to prep for and then take down our mast and coordinating the other contractors.
However, using what I have posted, I believe you can see why one must be careful in relying on weather protections that are more than a few days before the actually event. Even though you can get the model to project out up to two weeks before the event, the reliance of such data to pick a departure date can be dangerous.