Weather on the Beeb site 

This page was produced after I was asked about the Coastal forecasts on the BBC website. Some notes on the BBC site are set out below to help anyone using it. Essentially it is a useful resource but heavy on download times - unless you use the Text Only versions. It is, then, very useful for mobile phone GSM or GPRS use, except that the Text Only pages cannot be bookmarked.

Shipping Forecast Inshore and Coastal Forecasts Observations Charts Download Times Using Saildocs

Summary of the site

  
The BBC has produced a very useful weather site for sailors. There are links to texts of the latest Shipping Forecast and the Inshore Waters forecast. This latter is the 17 area version broadcast on Marine VHF by the HMCG and not the inferior 9 area version broadcast by Radio 4 after the late night shipping forecast.

There are also observations from buoys, coastal stations, surf reports and tide tables. There are forecast charts for the next 5 days in a reasonably  quick

 download and a set of coastal  forecasts.

The downside to the site is that downloads are very large for a small amount of information. This is not a problem when ashore but can be costly when using a GSM, GPRS or satellite phone. This page suggests ways around the problem for the cost conscious using a laptop and a mobile phone.  It also makes some comments on a very useful service.

Shipping Forecast Page

 
This page has the latest Shipping Forecast as broadcast on Radio 4 LW. It also contains texts of the latest version as broadcast by the NAVTEX stations at NITON, CULLERCOATS and PORTPATRICK. These are only broadcast twice a day but are useful extras as they include a brief 24 hour outlook. Very importantly, there is also the extended outlook that is broadcast once  a  day from the UK NAVTEX stations. This is one matter in which the UK is ahead of the field in the area of marine forecasting. In addition, the High Seas Forecast is available on this page as a 24 hour North Atlantic, METAREA I, forecast including a brief 24 hour outlook. Latest warnings are also included.

One has to ask why all this information is not on the Met Office site.

Inshore and Coastal Forecasts

 
Texts of the Inshore Waters Forecasts as broadcast by the MRCC/MRSCs around the UK, ie the HMCG VHF broadcasts, are updated twice a day sometime after 0500 and 1700 UTC. This might be a quicker way of obtaining these forecasts than awaiting the HMCG broadcast schedule. These forecasts are produced by a forecaster using, as his guidance, the latest run of the NWP model. The Met Office runs the model four times a day.

There are also Coastal Forecasts.. These are issued twice a day, covering 24 hours in 6-hour periods ie 0000 to 0600, 0600 to 1200, 1200 to 1800 and 1800 to 0000 UTC. The texts seem to be generated directly from the model output with no vetting or modification by a forecaster. There are 24 areas covered around the UK and the Channel Isles. Lengths of coast to which the forecasts refer are, thus, on average about 2/3 of those covered by the Inshore

  Waters forecasts. I suggest that these Coastal Forecasts should be use in conjunction with the Inshore Waters version as this has human input. The text of a forecast will look like

1200 - 1800
Pressure - 1020 mb F
Temp max/min - 7/3 degrees C
Wind speed - F4-5 becoming F3-5
Wind direction - N
Max gust in knots - 30 becoming 31
Sea state - Slight becoming Wavelets
Visibility - Very good
There the follows Sig(nificant) weather in a symbol format.

Buoy and Coastal Observations

 
Actual weather information can be accessed from Buoys and from Coastal Stations all around the UK and the Channel Isles.  For both buoy and land station it is necessary to use a menu to select individual stations. The land stations list is very comprehensive and gives more reports than the Met Office site. However, the Met Office Synoptic Observation page gives a table every hour  for the last hour. Coastal stations on the BBC site are only available every three hours.

On both the Met Office buoy site and the BBC page of Buoy and Light Vessel  observations, data can only be obtained for one station at a time.

Curiously they do not have  many data for the North Sea. Five more North Sea buoys are shown  on the US (NOAA) Data Buoy page  

NOTE  Be careful when using the coastal reports from the long list on the BBC pages. Many, eg Dartmouth and Brixham, are not representative of the weather out to sea. Buoy and Lightvessel reports are probably more useful as indicators of current conditions at sea.

Atlantic Pressure Charts

 
Forecast synoptic charts are available, updates once a day in the morning, for each of the next 5 days at 1200 UTC. The total download is about 250 kb which is about average for the amount of information presented.

NOTE - Look carefully at the days for which charts are available. On a

Sunday morning recently, for example, clicking on Monday still gave a Sunday chart. This might have been because of slow updating. However, I tried later and it then showed the first chart as being for Saturday! More likely are that there are still some bugs in a fairly new service.

Other Information

  
There are other pages containing Surf reports, Sea temperatures, Tide tables, information about the Coastguard and MCA and weather Links (but not to this site!).

Download Times
All in all the service on the BBC weather pages is good and comprehensive. When using a fast data connection, ie normal telephone or broadband, then the size of downloads is not too critical. However, if afloat, perhaps at anchor, accessing the Internet via cell phone or Satphone then the file sizes are annoyingly large and downloading slow and costly. The possibility of a broken connection is increased.

An Inshore Waters forecast for one area downloaded from the BBC site needs a file total size of about 150 kb. The total text content  is just about 4 kb. To get the text of the whole Inshore waters forecast plus the three day outlook from the Met Office website takes a download of about  55 kb. Even then, the total text is only around 7 kb.

Even using a GPRS connection the file sizes can still be costly, especially when using Roaming. Be warned!

However, there are Text only links which have no frills and are commendably fast. The problem with these is that they cannot be bookmarked. One solution is to save one of the pages, for example, the Marine Index page as a "Favorite" and click the box "Make available offline". To use, open this page offline and click on Text only. This will bring up a very clear text page with a menu.

 As an alternative for the Inshore Waters forecasts and the three day outlook it may be more convenient to use the Saildocs  web page text facility.  Simply send an email to  query@saildocs.com with the text "send .http:// etc  Use http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/coast/inshore/regional_forecast.shtml?N" where N= 1, 2, 3 ....17 for the coastal areas in order starting from Cape Wrath to  Rattray Head including Orkney. Rattray Head to Berwick on Tweed, round to Shetland Isles. See the table on the BBC Inshore Waters  page for the list of areas. For the Three day Outlook for Inshore Waters use http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/coast/inshore/threeday_outlook.shtml

To get the  Coastal Forecasts texts through Saildocs use send  http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/coast/coastalforecast/regional_forecast.shtml?N where N = 1, 2, 3 ........to 22, 23, 24 for the areas Cape Wrath to Duncansby Head including Orkney, Duncansby Head to Rattray Head, Rattray Head to Fife Ness  etc .... ....  round to Ardnamurchan Point to Cape Wrath including Outer Hebrides, Shetland Isles and Channel Isles. For the whole list see the BBC Coastal Forecast page.

See the example below. One email can request several pages.

For the Shipping and High Seas forecasts, the try the WMO links on my GMDSS page.

Example of Message to Saildocs

 

A request for two Inshore waters forecasts for Colwyn Bay to the Mull of Galloway including Isle of Man and for  Lough Foyle to Carlingford Lough, a  Three day Outlook and two Coastal areas forecasts for Holyhead to 

Morecambe Bay and Lough Foyle to Carlingford Lough  the message would look like

The reply will come back, typically within 1/2 minute as 5 separate emails each of about 4 kb size, a considerable saving in telephone time and/or cost. In the reply you get the information on the website page stripped of all the html. In

other words, the messages will be just the text content of the page.

For the entire Inshore forecast use the message -

send http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/coast/inshore/

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© Frank Singleton, February 2005

Minor revisions September 2006