Instructions

Weather Trainer Live is a large collection of training materials designed to help you master practical marine weather. The program contents are viewed through a custom window on your PC that looks and acts much like a conventional Internert web browser. External web pages, for example, can be viewed directly inside of the Weather Trainer window. Most of the Weather Trainer content is stored online, which you access by logging into the Starpath Online Weather Course inside the Weather Trainer window. Instructions for registering and logging in are in the Help section Online Course.

Desktop installation
The Weather Trainer viewer and associated files can be installed onto your computer either from a packaged CD or from a setup file that is downloaded from the Starpath website. Both sources provide the identical program and online resources.

The installer places a Desktop Index to the Weather Trainer on your desktop that has specific links to its various parts. You have a choice of opening the main Library of materials, the Legacy modules, or either of the two ebooks used in the package, Modern Marine Weather or The Barometer Handbook. There are also two US Navy reference manuals available as well. You can also open the Help files, one of which you are reading now. The Help files are also available from on the Weather Trainer Library page.

Program uses
The Weather Trainer package of materials can be used several ways. First, it is the set of training materials we use in the Starpath Online Weather course. This use of the materials is described in the online course itself, which gives specific reading assignments from the materials as well as exercises for each lesson. At the end of each lesson there is a practice quiz that summarizes what was covered. See Help section Online Course for more details.

Alternatively, you can use the vast amount of material in the Weather Trainer as a working resource for tracking down specific information about some aspect of marine weather. Most of the active weather related radio frequencies and channel numbers are included, as well as broadcast schedules for weather data. There are several in depth glossaries available, and numerous other resources, plus we try to include the most important online links to each aspect of marine weather covered in the course.

Specific subjects can be found several ways. There are topical "Atlases" available such as the Cloud Atlas, Sea State Atlas, etc and there is the Graphics section (see Help section Components). If a subject you are looking for contains any graphics, a key word search of the Graphics Index (Right Clink and Find) should find them. Also the Ask-Me section is organized by topic, which might be a way to track down specific topics. Finally, there is the Search Weather Trainer option (below), which should find any key words or phrases you ask for located anywhere in the program.

Search options
You can search the entire Weather Trainer content from the Seach button in the menubar. You can specify the sections to be searched or search all content. Once you are on a specific page of material, you can use Right Click from anywhere inside the Weather Trainer window to access the Find option, which seaches just the page you are viewing.

If you have further questions about how to use the program to meet your needs, please login to the online course and post a question in the Student Discussion Forum. Note that you can access the discussion group for posting questions from within the Weather Trainer viewer, under the Help menu.

Menu interactions
When you click an item from the menu bar (Library, References, Glossary, etc.) the submenu of topics appears in the left panel (the main screen itself does not change at this point). Then click a topic from the left panel to have it open in the main window. Back and Forward links are on the left panel, and also available from a right click on the any panel of any screen.

Backtracking
The Weather Trainer is a large collection of materials, which are interlinked in many ways. It is possible to surf through the materials following related leads and end up rather far from where you started. To get back to where you started, any of the back buttons will step you back through the history of your route, or you can go directly back to the Library page with a click of the Library link in the main menu followed by a click to home page in the left panel.