In this course you can learn about the mechanics of global weather, the foundations of ocean meteorology, predictive modeling and how sailors receive data via satellite and use high-performance navigation software. This course looks at oceanic meteorology and climatology through the lens of the sport of sailing. You will gain a basic knowledge of meteorology needed by sailors to take part in a regatta such as the Barcelona World Race, the only double-handed, round the world regatta with no stops. You will learn about the strategies employed during a round the world regatta and how these are put to use on board the latest ocean racing yachts.
Video 3.2.1 Medium and long term
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Del curso dictado por Universitat de Barcelona
Strategies for winning. Meteorology in a round the world regatta
34 calificaciones
Universitat de Barcelona
34 calificaciones
De la lección
The sailor as meteorologist
In this module you will learn how sailors use meteorology to sail around the world and to win round the world regattas.
All of their interest is focussed on the wind and they need theoretical, but above all practical, knowledge to help them to take the correct decisions at sea.
Remember you can access to the help forum.
If you are experiencing difficulty learning or accessing course content, or if you simply want more information.
Conoce a los instructores
Tomàs Molina
[MUSIC]
Right, so we've done our first routing, which is great.
Is the future going to be exactly like that?
Fairly unlikely, so
what we really want to find out is where this routing can go wrong.
Let's zoom out a little bit more.
For instance, to my eye, this following African coast here is very risky.
It's very risky because you have inside of the Comoros Islands here and
basically once you're inside, there's no option left to do anything else.
Cape Verde islands are really high which means that behind those islands there is
no wind, right.
So either you go inside as I suggest because the wind will be coming
from here more or less or you have to go quite far off shore, right.
If you're in here and all of the sudden you get a forecast over here.
It's getting really light.
You've got no options left.
So it's something which has potentially high risk.
So to for, to look at it, I'm going to do a little bit more to it.
I want to see the isochrones of this.
All right, the isochrones we talked about.
Let's see if I see anything in there, no... nothing too shocking.
However let me have a look at this... Okay, for its stuff going to look here...
a little pivot.
Here it gives me the options for
going somewhere else and what the consequences are of that.
So let's say I try this.
Just want to try.
I'll just go outside of Cape Verde here.
Click click.
Calculate new route from there on... all right.
You can see the isochrones starting again, this time they're green.
That's to distinguish it from the previous one.
There we go... and here at the bottom we've got the consequences of that.
The blue route is 2,542 miles from the waypoint,
and the green route is 124 miles behind.
124 miles.
At least we've got, at least, the quantity of this now.
If we want to, say, go for the safer option right,
if we can see this starting to go lighter here.
We could do that.
We could take the westerly route and come in like that.
Will cost us 124 miles.
What are the consequence if here it goes really light?
Do we lose 800 miles?
This is pretty secure route.
That's the sort of... and I would never get those all the time,
it's about a risk reward ratio.
Trying to assume what the risk is, and see what the potential reward are.
Because in this routing, we only did a basic one, but
if I take you back to those setting.
You remember this window where we chose to wait for it in the route?
You know there's other stuff here.
Photo speeds, photos are back again.
Right, I could do heaps of routings here.
I could say I want to go...
I'm sorry... I want to go from 90%
of the polar to 110% of the polar,
and I want to do it in steps of two degrees.
Well, why would I want to do that?
Those polars were supposed to be perfect, right, out of the VPP or
the data collection?
Well maybe they're not.
Maybe they were perfect when we were doing this data collection,
maybe that was earlier in the year, colder air, more humid, heavier air.
If the air is heavier, it pushes harder on your sails and you go quicker.
Or maybe in the beginning of the race, we're going to go all around the world,
we've got a lot of fuel, food, the boat's heavier, the boat will be slower.
So here we can test for sensitivity for the routes,
if we go 1 or 2% slower, maybe it's going to give us dramatically different route.
There's a lot of stuff to do like that.
You can play around with the wind speed.
What if the wind speed was a little bit stronger or
a little bit weaker than what the forecast is?
What happens if the weather is happening quicker?
Everything's happening six hours quicker.
If it's supposed to start raining tonight, it started raining at midday.
The weather was ahead of time.
You can put all that in and then you open up a whole plenitude of routings,
and you get a feeling for how secure your routing is,
how much probability that there is that it's going to happen.
And then we only have to look at only one model.
You maybe want to have a look at 20 different models.
So you can see that quite easily, you can get hundreds of routings on screen, and
then try to find out what is the safest option to actually choose your route.
And also, are you going for the long term or are you going for the short term?
What have we learned?
We have to decide where we want to go to, the waypoint, the point along the way.
We could always move them later on, but
at least we have to aim at a general direction.
We have learned that we need to open a GRIB file.
We know what a GRIB file is now.
We have learned how to set up a basic route and calculate where we're going and
get the suggested optimal route, which is never a straight line as you can see.
Let's simulate some of the problems we can have with routing.
That's just one model.
With I'm going to calculate a routing.
This time we're going to do it slightly different.
We're not going to start from outside Gibraltar, we're going to start
from the doldrums the waypoint will be put in halfway down to the Southern Ocean.
And then we could put the Southern Ocean entry and there's the final waypoint.
Good enough, calculation settings.
This time we're going to say,
you know we don't really want to deal with this really long-term stuff.
You know you really can't rely on the weather forecast all that sort of stuff.
And also it's very important for our friends, families, sponsors and
that sort of stuff that we are and a good result, that we have a good result today,
tomorrow, day after tomorrow, not in three weeks.
So let's just concentrate on the short term.
Let's do five days, five days will be good enough right?
So, you can do five days.
Now you see we go from the waypoint in doldrums down here.
Five days, here are the trade winds, you can already see from
the isochrones here that the route is... It's, you know, setting hard to the south,
It's because its got a more open angle. Remember to follow diagrams if we bear off,
if we open up the angle relative to the wind we go quicker.
Anyway, there we go.
Routing down, so we don't go on a direct route.
Fair enough.
This is quicker.
And this is optimum route.
Where do we end up?
We end up over here.
Hm, that looks a bit odd to end up over there.
It's like driving your car and you've heard on the radio that there's a traffic
jam somewhere or there's a bridge open.
But your GPS navigation device tells you to go there anyway
because GPS navigation device is like a program, just a box.
Computer, garbage in, garbage out.
There's no knowledge other than what you give it.
Let's try it again now, go back to this routing, calculator routing.
Right, same way points and all that.
And now name again in the calculation settings
we're going to give it 10 days instead of 5.
There we go.
Still the same story here.
I always look at the shape of these isochrones, because you can see that this
boat is hammering down south, due south, it's making a lot of distance.
It's not getting any closer to where he wants to go, but
he's making a lot of distance, he's quick.
All right, and then here, this is Southern Ocean,
here are the lows forming on the cold front of Rio de Janeiro, Uruguay.
Look, this one is starting to hook into this wind over here.
Whereas this one, look how close the isochrones are.
He's losing now.
This one's gaining, gaining, gaining, gaining, gaining, gaining.
So what's the route's going to be for this one?
Look, it's still gaining.
And this guy's almost upwind here.
Oops!
Check this out.
Five days, ten days, completely different route.
This guy, all the way down to here.
So during the week, he's been losing, losing, losing, going fast but
going fast nowhere, not towards the finish.
Sponsors start to call: Why are you lost on the schedule,
why did I give you so much money to sail around the world.
And that, in the end, all pays off, so
those are the sort of critical decisions navigator has to make.
Do I go for the short term? I want to be ahead of the other boats tonight and
tomorrow, or I am going to stick to my plan,
stick to my gun, think about the long term.
I have done my studies before, I know what's going to pay long term.
I know how the climate works around the planet.
I know where the next set of direction is going to come from.
I know that something will most likely happen here, right?
Not always, but it's very likely.
So you need a bloody good reason to ignore it, and to just go straight.
Anyway, one of many complications and
one of many decisions navigator on the boat has to take.
And they're not always easy because all the way down here
he's pulling his hair out, did I make the right decision.
And if you're here, you decide this was wrong, let's check in.
Then you've lost.
Then you are on the outside of the curve like in the car race,
you have definitely lost.
So this is a prime example of what the race is about.
A race is all about mental pressure on the sailors.
In Barcelona World Race there are two guys that take decisions together.
Maybe one is more knowledgeable than the other and
is sort of trying to force his opinion.
And over here, between those two boats, they're quite close together.
By the time they get here, this boat is a lot ahead of this boat.
I mean, we're going here, all right.
So all these day, four days, these boats have been losing, losing,
losing, every skit.
Skit is the results coming through.
They come through every six hours or so.
So every six hours they go, okay, we're lost to him, we're lost to him,
we're lost to him, we're lost to him, we're lost to him.
You're losing to everyone.
Losing to everyone and it's very depressing.
It happens every six hours.
So it's very hard to keep that up.
Apart from that, every six hours, you've got new weather.
New weather, and maybe the new weather was not as good as you were hoping for.
Where you start to doubt if this is going to happen, right?
By the time you are here both these guys have no options.
They have to stick to it.
This guy's going to go the direct route.
And is hoping that here the traffic jam will clear by the time he gets there.
Because if it doesn't clear, that's the end of it, you know?
But if here, he changes his mind and
he goes more toward the green route, he's behind anyway.
Same for the green one.
The green one's hoping for the big sausage at the end.
That's what he's convinced is going to happen.
But he can't do anything else right now.
If he does, it happened in the last race,
if he does he has to sail upwards to get to the blue boats.
By the time he gets to the blue line, he'll be hundreds of miles behind.
He's lost the race as well.
So they both stuck to the gameplan basically.
And it's an enormous pressure then to stick to that,
swallow the results every six hours, try to update the weather every six hours,
which you get doubts in your mind and all that sort of stuff, and
at the same time keep the boat going.
Because you're only two guys on board. You have to go fast.
You have to trim the sails, you have to helm. All that sort of stuff.
You have to work at the short term
because here the tropics are also rain showers around squalls.
Under a squall, there is no wind, right?
All those things you have to combine and to keep working on long term.
You can't work on only long term.
It's a short term, medium term and long term.
You have to make your own plan.
If not, you end up a little bit like,
comparative to Formula One driving for instance.
If someone is driving a car like Alonso, or something, always starting
the curve when the guy ahead of him is starting to curve, he's always late.
He's always late.
He has to have his own plan for
trek, for when he spits the steering wheel into the curve.
It's the same with sailing.
If you're following the other guy, you're always slightly late into the event.
You have to have your own game plan, and
then sort of hope that the rest of the fleet's going to stay with you,
because that's what gives most guys a lot of panic.
We're doing something different than the rest of the fleet.
Right? And if it goes wrong then we'll never see the fleet again until we're
back in the harbor.
And that is sort of the pressure of the fleet, the press,
the sponsors, family, you're own future as a professional sailor.
Everything is on the line so it's tough decisions it's really tough decisions.
Especially tough for people who have never done it.
That they've never taken those kinds of decisions, it looks like a video game but
once you're out on the water you have to take the decision and
bear the consequences.
And until you've actually done it a few times and
you've taken decisions that turn out to right and some that turn out to be wrong
you can know the consequences and, sort of live with the results of your decisions.
Before that, it's pretty tough call.
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