Weather forecast for the Med

[Lyra]

I know that there are several forum members who sail in the Mediterranean so just wanted to let you know that there is a site which provides GRIB files at very high resolution covering all the Med. It's been running for the last 2-3 years but till recently covered only the eastern Med.
The person who is operating this site is a sailor with great interest in meteorology.
Raw data is from the university of Athens but he runs a different model (the Athens model GRIBs are also available on this site).

www.openskiron.org/en/

[patprice]

Thanks Lyra

Have been using GRIB files for years for blue water cruising in the Pacific and, with some issues, have found them very useful.

I have found you get a bit more wind than the GRIB files show and that is because the files show average wind whereas yachties are more tuned to gusts.

It will be interesting to see if they are useful for the Ionion Islands area. I have generally found them useful for offshore and they do not pick up local coastal affects.

Will track with interest.

For users of Open CPN there is a GRIB Plugin available.

[Lyra]

This is why it is important to select the right forecast site (which uses a certain model) to match your needs.

For oceans synoptic scale models are used (such as GFS) and provide good results, but use the same models for the Med and you get unreliable forecasts - they will provide the "big picture" but this is useless for you being say between Kos and Astipalea.

University of Athens (http://forecast.uoa.gr/gmap/) and Openskiron.org use different models (SKIRON and WRF respectively) which are on the mesoscale level and consider local effects due to  islands, mountains etc. - It is more difficult to provide good forecast at this level but these sites do a pretty good job at the 2 days high resolution, and the 5 days low resolution, which is typically enough for the Med.

I usually consult one site that gives the "big picture" like passageweather.com and compare the results from these two sites - if they show the same thing then great, if not then I compare which of them is closer to the big picture (and then again sometime it is the other one that is correct).

For those who do not use OpenCPN or do not have a PC onboargd (which can run ZyGrib) a useful application for mobiles is SailGrib