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Radar Images for Weather on your phone..and much more…

By Russ, on August 11th, 2008

palm700 thumbThe Memory Map application for mobile phones and PDA’s is fantastic example of software development for mobile devices. This application has been around for some time, and is the work of US based developer Richard Stevens and his team. Richard is a software developer with 15 year’s experience in scientific super-computing and high-performance real-time systems such as medical imaging machines and high-end radar systems.

From the MemoryMap web site …

“Memory-Map Weather Radar is an application to display live National Weather RadarWeather Service doppler radar images and animated loops from radars located throughout the United States. Radar is the most effective tool to detect precipitation, especially thunderstorms, and has been used by NWS forecasters since the 1940′s. Memory-Map now brings this information, conveniently and efficiently, right to your phone or PDA.

With Memory-Map Weather Radar, when you update the image, the radar data is downloaded as a compressed overlay, without having to download the whole base image each time. There are no usage fees or subscriptions for using the service, except your mobile carrier’s normal data access fees. If the sky is clear, the download is only 1 or 2 kbytes; if there is widespread rain, it might be 10 kbytes. The first time you view each radar station, the base map image is downloaded, which is 50 to 100kbytes….”

Although the radar product is limited to the USA, what I didn’t realise is that his company has produced a full navigation product Memory-Map Navigator – for hiking and sailing that covers the UK!. Take look at the excellent video here.

This takes the use of the built in GPS on a smartphone into a whole different realm….

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Accesing the internet while sailing..

By Russ, on August 9th, 2008

DSC01794Of course you can simply browse the internet directly using a modern phone with GPRS. But even my Samsung i780 is a sloth when using Internet Explorer or oven the Opera browser to do this. Stick the phone into a laptop using the USB cable and suddenly browsing the internet becomes bearable – even “acceptable” – its magic…see the picture – my phone is the tiny display behind the laptop.

You can of course use bluetooth to connect the phone and the laptop – if the GPRS signal is weak try putting the phone in a (dry) place in the cockpit while using the laptop in the saloon. This will give a better GPRS signal to the phone but the bluetooth signal to the laptop is slightly slower than having the phone wired directly in using USB. Experiment with both methods.

So on my recent sailing holiday to the Normandy coast I thought I would try out the possibility of using this combination. I can happily report that both in the marina at Fecamp and even sailing along the coast – while in proximity to the coast of course – you can access my weather page – and all the weather links and the UK Met Office 24hr forecast.

What I do is then copy and paste the forecast, and right click on images like the barometric charts and save them to a table in a Word document that I keep as a passage plan. Very useful for reviewing as the passage develops – and the possibility of having to change plan dawns on you!

If you want more information about using your mobile phone on board check out my dedicated “phones page“….

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Using your barometer to forecast the wind…

By Russ, on February 6th, 2008

Scurrying home from a rather bleak and windy pontoon at Brighton Marina the other night I was thinking about the weather advice that one barometerof the old salts had been giving me over a warming glass of wine (yes, not rum!)…

Given the strength of the depressions that are passing over the UK at the moment I had asked how he would tell if a depression was going to bring strong or gale force winds – given of course that he wouldn’t know a grib file from a grab bag – and he advised me that as a rough guide a fall in the barometer of 6mb in 3hrs expect a force 6; 8mb in 3hrs expect a force 8. Given that we first discovered the connection between atmospheric pressure and the weather in the 17th Century you would have thought we would all be accustomed to using the barometer well instead of treating it like a piece of brass furniture – or is it just me?

In a BBC weather forecast when the barometer is described as “falling quickly” or “rising quickly”, it means a fall or rise of 3.6 to 6mb in a 3hr period. If the words used are “very quickly” then that means a movement of 6mb in a 3hr period.

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Gale Warnings Feb 2008

By Russ, on February 2nd, 2008

Gale Warnings

 

Gale Warnings2

 

 

 

 

 

You dont often see a Met Office chart like this – we are getting Gale Warnings in every sea area around the British Isles at present…all the areas coloured red…

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2008 Hurricanes Season?

By Russ, on February 2nd, 2008

Given the unusual number of vessels coming to grief recently around the English coast I started to research to see of there is anything significantly different about the weather this year so far. I wanted to know if it was on the way to being as bad as 2004/5 ?

It’s going to be a modestly more active than average Atlantic hurricane season in 2008, according to the December seasonal forecast issued by Dr. Bill Gray and Phil Klotzbach of Colorado State University (CSU).

The forecasters examined the observed atmospheric conditions and ocean temperatures during the main hurricane months of October-November 2007 each year, and gave the years an ACE rating. ACE stands for Accumulated Cyclone Energy and is a measure of the total destructive power of a hurricane season, based on the number of days strong winds are observed).

The key conditions for hurricanes are apparently:
1. A moderate La Nina event
2. Near average tropical Atlantic sea surface temperatures (SSTs)
3. Warm far North Atlantic SSTs.

There is a table of years by descending ACE index here

So according to Dr. Bill Gray and Phil Klotzbach 2008 should be only marginally worse than the average. ….hmmm…

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