Near Real-time Wind, Pressure, and Sea State Data

Ship Reports

Now you can get all ship reports within 300 nmi of a selected location at sea that were transmitted over the past 6 hours to the WMO Voluntary Observing Ship program. You can send this email to see how it works

[email protected]

...or overwrite the request with your choice of Lat and Lon in the Subject Line of the message in decimal degrees (35.3N, 10.8W). You will get the reports back in a few minutes by return mail, both as a text list of the reports and as a GPX file (few kB) that can be imported to a navigation program. This is a free service compliments of Starpath School of Navigation. Below is an article that explains the use of the service and how the GPX file appears in popular nav programs, as well as Google Earth.

Near Real-time Ship Reports by Email

For abbreviations used, send an email to [email protected] with the word " help" in the subject line. That help file can also be viewed here. If no reports are available, you will get a notice of that. If the return is totally blank, then check that there is a comma between Lat and Lon in the subject line.

The reports are compiled by the NDBC in collaboration with the US VOS program and their global partners. These data are available online at the NDBC; we are simply forwarding it to vessels at sea via email and creating the GPX files as a convenience.

Ship reports and ASCAT wind data are the only compliments to our own observations that we have to evaluate model forecasts offshore.  In coastal waters, this is a way to get near-live weather data in the offshore direction. It is also a way to calibrate your barometer when sailing offshore if you have any doubts about it.


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