Review of Weather Forecast Services for Ship Routing Purposes

Weather data is nowadays used in a variety of navigational and ocean engineering research problems: from the obvious ones like voyage planning and routing of sea-going vessels, through the analysis of stability-related phenomena, to detailed modelling of ships’ manoeuvrability for collision avoidance purposes. Apart from that, weather forecasts are essential for passenger cruises and fishing vessels that want to avoid the risk associated with severe hydro-meteorological conditions. Currently, there is a wide array of services that offer weather predictions. These services include the original sources – services that make use of their own infrastructure and research models – as well as those that further postprocess the data obtained from the original sources. The existing services also differ in their update frequency, area coverage, geographical resolution, natural phenomena taken into account and finally – output file formats. In the course of the ROUTING project, primarily addressing ship weather routing accounting for changeable weather conditions, the necessity arose to prepare a report on the state-of-the-art in numerical weather prediction (NWP) modelling. Based on the report, this paper offers a thorough review of the existing weather services and detailed information on how to access the data offered by these services. While this review has been done with transoceanic ship routing in mind, hopefully it will also be useful for a number of other applications, including the already mentioned collision avoidance solutions.