From the photo above, taken in the lagoon adjacent to Cape Lookout in North Carolina’s Outer Banks, you can see there is a bit of breeze. In fact, this breeze woke us up at 0400 with the wind shift, meter high waves, and bumping the bottom wih the keel. Coastal cruising, in a country with as much weather data as the USA, there is no excuse for getting caught by weather, We’ll come back to this subject and preparation for adverse situations, later.
Right now we want to chat about a couple of inexpensive IPad Apps that work really well f or local weather.
We’ll start with “My Radar”. If you have a GPS equipped IPad it knows where you are, and shares this information with various Apps. My Radar knows the position and sends you radar for that area in a scale you choose. The green band is a front in the Northeast US that had brought snow to assist with Halloween celebrations.
The second app is BuoyData.com. It has a database of weather buoys world wide. If you want to know what the weather is actually doing, click on a buoy in the area of interest.
This screen shows you the closest buoys which have weather and wave data.
There are a series of links to useful pages such as this one with hourly historic data.
Which you can also look at graphically.
The most recent information looks like this (it is windy and cold as we are writing this).
There is also a local radar display.
Finally, there is a link to the local weather forecast.
These two Apps are in constant use aboard Wind Horse.
Posted by Steve Dashew (November 4, 2011)
November 4th, 2011 at 11:15 pm
Don’t know about their coverage in your area, but Weather Underground’s forecasts have been eerily accurate with our extremely erratic weather patterns around here (Vail, CO); they seem to combine NOAA data with that of local amateur “observers” and usually hit the nail on the head – far better than NOAA themselves. Used to be our only forecasting rule was “take what the ski company predicts and divide by 3”, but WU does that for us nowadays 😉
Crap. More snow tonight. I need a beach.
Mike
November 4th, 2011 at 11:58 pm
Dear Steve,
Another very interesting blog entry. Just one thing: The iPad (as well as the iPhone) can do screenshots: Press the power button (top right) then press the home button once. The screen flashes and the picture is stored in your photo library on the iPad. Aperture or iPhoto can import them. That’s probably easier und you get better results.
Cheers, Daniel
November 5th, 2011 at 9:59 am
Thanks Daniel:
Great suggestion which we shall put to work.
November 5th, 2011 at 7:24 am
G’Day
If you do not already have it iGrib http://www.mojoso.co.uk/igrib/ Available from the APP store is worth a look. iPad/iPhone APP
November 5th, 2011 at 9:58 pm
Steve,
Thanks for the tips on these iPhone apps — here in the PNW, it’s always useful to have up to minute buoy info when navigating these complex waters. BTW, the app I downloaded from iTunes (which looks same as your screen shots) was called NOAA Bouy and Tide Data by Verona Solutions.
November 10th, 2011 at 12:21 pm
Steve, what size flash storage do you use/reccomend, 16/32/64GB? Any problems viewing the screen when you use it on deck?
November 10th, 2011 at 5:52 pm
Howdy Mike:
I am the wrong person to ask. But our Ipad has about 5gigs of data.