Sail Planner

Weather

The high resolution weather you will have in Sailplanner is from Weathertech.

WeatherTech offers weather forecasts for professional users. Weathertech provide services for owner/operators of wind power plants, district heating operators and the hydropower industry.

Modern weather forecasts are based on simulations with advanced numerical models. The models, based on physics, include databases with terrain height, land use etc. Four times a day observations are collected by national weather services. The observations are used to find the state of the atmosphere at a given time. This is done on a global scale. One often speaks about the 00, 06, 12, and 18 UTC analysis cycles. Based on these analyses, national weather services run global weather forecasts.

 

In order to run global weather forecast models in operational mode, i.e., to provide forecasts while they still are forecasts, powerful supercomputer systems are required. However, even today the horizontal resolution in global forecasts is limited for computational reasons. Typical horizontal resolutions in global weather forecasts are on the order of 50 km.

 

For smaller scale phenomena such as convection, sea breeze circulations and nocturnal/low level jets, a horizontal grid resolution of the order of 50 km is not enough to resolve these phenomena. This is where meso-scale models come in. A meso-scale model is typically run over a limited area with initial and lateral boundary conditions given by a global weather forecast model. Since a meso-scale model is run over a limited area, the models can be run with a higher grid resolution than global models. Moreover, meso-scale models in many cases have a better representation of processes in the boundary layer (typically the lowest 100 to 1000 m of the atmosphere) important for e.g., the low-level wind field.

 

In Sailplanner, high-resolution weather forecasts are provided by WeatherTech Scandinavia. ‘State of the art’ meso-scale models are used to produce detailed forecasts both in time, 1 hour temporal resolution) and space, 4-12 km horizontal resolution.