The blog
The Mediterranean Sea has a unique configuration in the world. An enclosed maritime area of nearly two thousand nautical miles from west to east, it is only open to the Atlantic by a strait of eight nautical miles. Read more …
Update 2.2 (February 2025)
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2025 marks the 100 years of the broadcast of marine weather forecasts The Shipping Forecast on BBC Radio 4. This emblematic transmission, produced by the UK Met Office on behalf of MCA_media, continues to be a vital safety service for mariners along our coasts.
I had written an article at the beginning 2010 (¹) on the gradual disappearance of radio weather forecasts in France, and praised the consistency of the BBC bulletin. Fifteen years later, the marine weather forecast is still broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Long Waves at the same unchanging times. Hats off ! Read more …
© Maritime Museum of Tatihou Island 2005
No, these are not the catastrophic rantings of an inveterate collapsologist, but a very serious study reported by the climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf. I give here a French and freely adapted transcription.
The warm currents that reach Europe are now called by climatologists AMOC, in English the "Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation". Read more …
The Pacific Ocean is switching from an El Niño event at the beginning of the year 2024 to a La Niña event expected at the end of this summer. But it seems, for NOAA scientists, that a similar phenomenon is also occurring at this same time in the Atlantic Ocean (¹). Read more …
The climatic phenomenon ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation) had experienced a new episode El Niño towards the end of spring 2023 in the tropical regions of the Pacific (¹). After reaching a peak between November and December 2023, the phenomenon began to decrease (²). During the second quarter 2024 he returned to a situation called " Neutral ”. But quickly from July a new episode La Niña started, whose climatic consequences are the opposite of the previous episode.
Source : NOAA Climate / ENSO Blog Read more …
Episode 2 – Illustrations
Forecasts IFREMER (see Episode 1) available in Weather4D are of two kinds :
These files concern areas of the Channel and Atlantic whose coverage and resolutions are significantly different. Read more …
Episode 1 – Description
Since 7 May 2024 the latest versions of Weather4D have been enriched with several new weather and ocean models (¹). Among the latter, ultra-high resolution current and wave forecast models from’Ifremer come in addition to Copernicus models (formerly called MyOcean) for the Channel and Atlantic coasts. These forecasts are provided with hectometric grids, can be reduced up to 190 meters for some models. So Ifremer, what is ? Read more …
An incomprehensible malfunction occurred recently for a Weather4D user, sailing in a “lost hole” on the edge of the Indian Ocean, namely the Cocos Islands, challenged me to the point of getting lost in conjectures. A GFS file due ten days ago categorically refused to be displayed in the application with the date, damn !
This unfortunate sailor - for which I would like to thank him - forced me to make a determined search for the cause of the problem.. After much procrastination, explorations of settings that may be faulty, since no other user had reported such a problem to us, the light finally came out ! Read more …
Latest releases Lite, Routing, Routing & Navigation arrive with a full renewed list of weather and ocean models in order to allow users to benefit from the evolution of the offer of international forecasting models. At the same time, all GRIB files go to format GRIB-2, this allows for a reduction in their size and a better compression ratio. Read more …