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Author
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Topic: NEW Pilot Charts
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billriner
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posted January 26, 2011 05:22 PM
I found "Atlas of Ocean Winds & Currents: Sailing Directions" by Alan Phillips on Amazon. The description says "This is the latest and best ocean wind information available. It has been collected by NASA satellites over ten years. It replaces the old pilot charts which were collected from sailing ship logs. These charts have never been published before."
Does anyone know anything about these new pilots? Are the more accurate than the ones from the Defense Mapping Agency? Do I need to pay for these when the DMA charts are free online?
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David Burch
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posted January 26, 2011 10:07 PM
The best source of ocean wind data that indeed does replace all previous data is presented at the cogow web site.
we discuss this in detail in Modern Marine Weather.
it could be he lifted their data and published it. their data are from quikscat satellites.
From: Starpath, Seattle, WA
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David Burch
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posted January 26, 2011 10:25 PM
he seems to have several dozen ebooks all called sailing directions, which appears to be the name of the series.
if you have a specific link to this atlas data we will check it out. many of the books seem to be reprints of government documents.
We might be a bit suspicious of data claimed to have never been published before.... makes you wonder how he saw it!
pilot charts have very much data on them besides wind. the only data that has been updated are the wind data, and in fact we show in the book that the pilot charts are indeed quite good, but the cogow data is how you prove it.
From: Starpath, Seattle, WA
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David Burch
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posted January 26, 2011 10:57 PM
found it. yes, this is the cogow data. he must have just screen captured it and printed in a book. i do not see any reference to Craig Risien whose work it is. however, the page previews online do not say much and do not show any of the actual data... so maybe he does have the proper acknowledgements in there. to even show one screen capture, one is supposed to give the website to the data and also acknowledge the research paper for the work.
most likely you are better off capturing what you need online when you need it. you cannot get the detail available for the whole world in such a small book. the cogow online presentation is quite wonderful, and very detailed.
From: Starpath, Seattle, WA
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David Burch
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posted January 27, 2011 05:12 PM
I have taken a look at this product. The answer to your question is No, you should not buy this "book." It is a complete ripoff, and plagiarizes Dr. Craig Risien's research paper as well as his data, which is published online with specific guidelines for reproducing any one picture, let alone 12 pictures.
Beyond all that, the author has made an essentially useless compilation of random pictures with no table of contents, no theme, and no explanation. the only text in the entire document is what you can read in the amazon preview, which was lifted illegally, totally out of context, from the cogow webpage. the cogow data are very poorly presented. You can capture and print your own version much better, since the book only lifted the zoomed out world view.
Even if all the data were legal, this would not be worth a 99 cents iphone app, let alone a $9.90 kindle ebook and $28 printed book. Unless amazon has no standards whatsoever in quality and integrity, my guess is this "book" will not be there very long.
The Kindle version we looked at even had huge typos in the Title of the book, reflecting how little the author cared about this self published assault on the sensibilities of all mariners.
From: Starpath, Seattle, WA
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billriner
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posted February 09, 2011 07:20 PM
I talked to Craig Risien and he learned of this about a week ago. He has complained to Amazon.com and notified the legal department at his university.
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