Saildocs

The service Saildocs is a free service with which we can download official meteorological maps and also via our email on the ship GribFiles which is a coded form of the raw weather forecasts automatically generated by weather models. Grib Files are, in simpler terms, digital weather maps with global geographical coverage.

So let's assume we are traveling in the Indian Ocean and we want to receive the forecast for the next 5 days in the ship's email. In this case, all we have to do is compose an email and send it to the address query@saildocs.comIn the email title we can write whatever we want, while in the main body of the email we write the following encoded text:

send gfs:10N,40S,20E,125E|2,2|12,24..120|PRESS,WIND,WAVES

By sending the above email, after a short time we will receive an automatic response from the service Saildocs which will contain attached the forecast for the area surrounded by the parallels of 10 degrees north and 40 degrees south and by the meridians of 20 degrees east and 125 degrees east. The forecast will have a resolution of 2 degrees, with a time step of 12 hours and a time duration of 5 days ahead. The parameters that we will receive will be the wind, the barometric pressure and the height of the significant wave.

The file we will receive will be about 100 KB in size and we can open it with a GribFiles reader (GribViewers). On the internet you can find many applications, either free or paid, that do this job. The one we recommend is the free ZyGrib application which you can download by clicking here.

In our seminar titled “New Methods of Getting Weather Information on Board” detailing all the methods by which you can receive on board all the official meteorological data via your email, while allowing you to practice using your laptop, as if you were on board.