March 23, 2016
We’re back in Picton, chased in by the threat of high wind gusts. Below are screen shots of what PredictWind has been showing the last few days…
This was really interesting to me. There’s been just about no wind here in the Marlborough Sounds. The top graph, wind, shows under ten knots for the next few days. The second graph, gusts, is what got us worried. It shows gusts to 35 knots! Maybe the bottom graph, rain, hints at why the gusts are so strong. It shows the gusty winds correlating with the rain. Front?
I don’t usually look at wind gusts on the GRIB models. I don’t even get it as an option the way I’ve been retrieving GRIBs to date. I just signed up for PredictWind and gusts are front and center there. Without this information, we’d still be out in the Sounds at anchor and I doubt we’d be too happy when the front hits tonight. Observations up north of us show gusts to 50 knots already.
The above graphs are for PredictWind’s PWG model (dark line) and PWC model (lighter line). Here’s what they say about them:
PWG is for PredictWind GFS and PWC stands for PredictWind CMC . The forecasts are proprietary to PredictWind, using the weather observation files from the GFS (Global Forecasting System) and the CMC ( Canadian Met Centre). PredictWind does not use the GFS/CMC forecasts, but simply the observations from GFS/CMC.
It would seem that gust data is available from the regular GFS model as well but not all retrieval systems can get this information. Below is windyty.com which displays the GFS model data in an incredibly useful (and very pretty) presentation. This image shows gusts, which seem to match PredictWind’s models pretty well. It also shows what looks like the responsible front.
When it comes to weather, I keep learning but any kind of mastery seems to be about a thousand years off. I do like my recent tools: PredictWind and Windyty.com. Both have Android apps that I have been using and am very pleased with. -Rich
Update, March 25, 2016 in Picton Marina
We didn’t get much in the way of northerlies that we came in from the Sounds to avoid, but last night, we got strong southerlies – gusting to 60 knots and practically laying us over on the dock we were along side. Everyone’s model missed that.
I might go back to my other weather prediction app… Heads it’ll be windy, tails – calm!
Guaranteed accurate 50% of the time!
