The PredictWind Weather Router is a super powerful tool that gives you the ability to safely and efficiently navigate the weather using the worlds best weather modelling technology.
This tutorial will cover Weather Routing using the PredictWind App.
On the PredictWind App scroll down to weather routing to open up the weather routing page.
At the top of the page tap on the settings wheel to set up Routing Preferences. This is where you can set up the Performance polars for your boat, the depth you want the router to use, motoring settings, and currents model selection.
Polars are important for the weather router to be able to give a more accurate reflection of your boat as it travels through the weather systems. You can select a Predefined Polar from the list. Or use the Sail option, which is a basic polar set up if your boat is not on the predefined list or there is not a similar performing design. We also have an Advanced option you can select, to edit Advanced Polars you will need to do this on the Web Version.
Once selected the Polar will transfer across all PredictWind Apps including the Offshore App. For making a simple adjustments to the polar you have the option to adjust the polar speed by a percentage. If, for example, you are delivering a boat short handed and expect the boat performance to be slow by 20%, please apply 80% to the Polar Speed Adjustments, you can make these adjustments for upwind and downwind.
You can also set up a motoring option for light winds. The router will assume we are motoring, at
X knots when boat speed is less than X knots.
The router can avoid certain depths to give you a more accurate calculated route, by setting the depth to 5m the route will not go into water less than 5m deep, we can choose a number of depth contours (land 2,5,10,20,30m). If your start or finish waypoints are too shallow the router will move them to deeper water. It is very important to always use charts and navigation tools to confirm your route once you have your proposed weather route.
You can toggle on Ocean and Tidal currents, and then select which current model you want to use in the weather routing calculation.
Another key feature of the Routing is the choice of routing for the “fastest route” or for comfort. In the Comfort setting, we can select parameters that the router will try to avoid. The minimum parameters are 25 knots and 2.5 metre swell waves.
Returning back to the weather routing map page, you can drag and drop the green start waypoint and the red finish waypoint to your desired locations. We could also position these using gps coordinates by tapping on the waypoint icon, and entering the Latitude/Longitude. Ensure your waypoints are well in the water. You can also add port and starboard rounding waypoints if desired.
To add a Boundary click on the Routing Options icon, click Boundaries and Create Boundary. Next, click on the map where you want to add a boundary, you need to make it a closed shape. Once you have the points on the map you can move each point and add a lat/ long if you wish to be specific. To delete the boundary, tap on the centre and delete. We will leave it on for this example.
You are now ready to calculate your weather route, Tap on Calculate. Your route will be calculated using your Polars and will show 6 routes which relate to the 6 weather models.
When you tap on the weather model from the bottom right we get the control panel pop out, here you can make changes to the display.
ECMWF is Black, UKMO is Yellow, Spire is Orange, PWG is blue. PWE is Red. GFS is Green. We also have other display controls, map display types are streamlines, wind barbs with colour contours, wind arrows with colour contours, Parameter selections are also changed here, Wind, Rain. Cloud. Air temperature. gust . Cape And wave,
The animation play speed is also changed in this pop-out.
Tap x to close.
The wind maps that are displayed relate to that model and that route. For example if we select the PWE model, this corresponds to the red track, and the boat is displayed on the active route.
You can choose to turn off one or more of the displayed routes by tapping on the toggle routes icon, tap on the tick box to turn on or off. Tap x to close
To animate the route press the play button, you can also control the display with the time slider, or the forward and back arrows.
By tapping on any point on a weather route we get detail for that point on the weather route.
At the top of the screen, tap on Tables, this has detailed data of our weather routes for all models. We have Graphs. Wind. Summary. Route. Wave . Atmosphere And Current. We also have the export function which allows us to export the weather route in several digital formats to be used in Navigation software.
Tap on the Map button to go back to the weather routing Map.
You are now ready to use the PredictWind Weather Routing tool.