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The Met Office has bungled things again. Instead of making weather forecasts simpler, they have contrived to make them over-complicated. Instead of a week-at-view, we now have to scroll up and down and to and fro. Probably invented by some gormless drip from a tin-pot university.
Please could I trouble our infinitely more sensible Sprint sailors to provide links to intelligible forecast sites. I'm not looking for Windguru which is an excellent site for what it does. Just a forecast site for the general weather situation.
Hi Corky,
I use more than one site, but I like xcweather.co.uk. I think this site was developed for light aircraft/microlight/hang glider pilots. As well as providing forecasts for your choice of specific locations, you can also look up the latest available weather info for a wide range of weather stations - mainly airports/aerodromes. Most places we sail at have a nearby airfield, so this recent data can give you a feel for the likely weather before you leave home or B&B/caravan/motorhome/tent. This is especially useful for clubs that don't have online weather info on their sites, or don't even have a website...
The site also shows weather maps of this data, giving a picture of the weather around, and with a bit of experience you can guess how this is likely to change. On the desktop site you can click on the wind arrows to get figures - this isn't available on the mobile site....
There is an xcweather app but I didn't like it as much as the website - it might have been updated since I deleted it...
Some things to remember. All the weather sites and apps use much the same base data on which to run their own algorithms to generate their forecasts. Some run updates more frequently than others. At any moment some sites/apps will be based on more up to date data than others. But their projections may be less accurate.... For all sites/apps forecasting, particularly the speed at which weather systems will move and develop, will occasionally be unreliable due to the weather itself being driven by "Chaos Theory". Climate change in the form of warming makes reliability of forecasting worse. Don't be fooled into thinking that a site showing hourly forecasts will be more accurate than one which shows forecasts at 3 hour intervals. But occasionally it's useful to see how they think a rapidly changing weather system will develop.
