There are so many sources of weather data on the Internet what to use can become confusing. There are a series of sights we check twice a day, to get a feel f or the rhythm of the weather, which incidentally is shaping up for a fast sailing passage if what we are seeing now holds.

Even though hurricane season is officially over we still check the National Hurricane Center tropical depression/storm/hurricane forecasts. We are looking for warning signs.

A favorite is the complete fax coverage in a single URL including the surface, 500mb, winds and waves current conditions to 96 hours forecast.

A new product from the National Hurricane Center in the form of a five day gridded forecast with surface winds,  pressure, and waves for the tropical area south of the fax coverage above. Extends from the West Indies out to mid-Atlantic.

The duty forecaster’s comments on how the models are performing and what might happen that is not covered in the broadcast forecast. http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/raw/ag/agnt40.kwnm.mim.atn.txt

Passage Weather for a quick look at the GFS GRIB files. http://www.passageweather.com/

And finally, we download GRIB files using Saildocs and review them in Expedition where we run routings (more on this later).