Downloading Historical Wind Data for route planning
Historical weather “Grib” data is needed as one of the first steps in planning your passage or race leg. Before you get too deep into planning your leg, you can use this historical data to do some initial routing.
Software like Expedition and Adrena can do this for you. In the Globe 40 we used the last 10 years of weather data “Reanalysis ECMFW” for each leg in our initial planning. We used this to generate the optimal routing for each year across 10 days, totaling 100 routes per leg. This provides your initial starting point when you plan.
Obtain Historical Data here (You will need to create a free account)
Steps:
Enter the parameters you need on the web page: N S E W Latitude and Longitude grid and the number of years and months you require.
Download the file. Note these are many hundreds of MB in size.
Upload file into Expedition (Under the “Weather Data” menu and “Settings”)
Create a route
Run “Optimize”
There will be a more detailed blog on routing and the value of historical routes coming in the future.
Run a route every day for 5 days from Feb 20th 2012 over the next 10 years 2012 - 2022
50 historical optimal routes from Grenada to Lorient via the Azores