Instant Weather Forecasting

Publisher: Adlard Coles Nautical, 2005 £ 7.99

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Instant Wind Forecasting;Alan Watts;Adlard Coles Nautical, 2005; £11.99; CA 16570

Who isn’t interested in the weather and how it might develop?  For yachtsmen from ocean racers to fair-weather port-hoppers, these concerns are constant pre-occupations.  Nobody wants to be caught out, or to miss a trick.  However, even though today we have never been better served, with masses of information available by radio, fax, or email, it never seems enough.  The underlying reason of course, is that the sources of weather are not only highly complex, but they may easily combine so as to be intrinsically unforecastable on the time scales most of us are interested in – the next day or so.  It should not be surprising, therefore, that many forecasts, particularly those for highly complicated areas such as UK coastal waters, are frequently wrong – sometimes hopelessly so.

Do these books help?  Well, they have both been continually in print for over 25 years, so they must be good!  However, given the problems the professional forecasters have, I find both titles somewhat pretentious.  How on earth can we do better than them?  On the other hand, increased understanding never hurt anyone, and the author has done a very good job in both books of presenting the complexities of weather in an easily digestible form.  Yachtsmen also have a big advantage on the professional forecasters in that they are mainly interested in the local weather, say over a radius of 50 to 100 miles, while the professionals are striving to deal with a region that may easily be a hundred times larger.  We can see and feel the weather as it’s actually developing while the latest forecasts we have may be 12 or 24 hours old.

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