Online Marine Weather Course

Prior to this latest version, mariners studied the diverse and extensive content of the Weather Trainer on their own—unless they had independently enrolled in a weather course that used this training tool. Now every user of the Weather Trainer has the guidance of a long-tested interactive course to coordinate the use of the materials as well as the personal assistance of a professional marine weather instructor.

The Starpath Weather Trainer program has now been combined with the Starpath Online Marine Weather Course under the new name Weather Trainer Live.

To access the online course, or to access the Weather Trainer directly, you can use links on the Weather Trainer Live Desktop Index, which is opened from an icon on your desktop after you install the program.

When you log direclty into the Online Weather Course you will see several forums.

Marine Weather Classroom
Individual lessons with Assignments, notes, and quizzes are presented here, as well as a set of guidelines to the use of the online features of the course.

Marine Weather Student Discussion Forum
Past and present discussion of marine weather topics are presented in this Forum. This is the place you would look for an answer to a question you might have, and if you do not find it, you can post a question of your own. Questions are usually answered the same day, but if you do not hear back from us within 48 hours we ask that you either send an email to [email protected] or call us at 206-783-1414.

Certification—Weather
This forum contains the certification tests, which are taken as an option at the end of the course. If you choose this option, this forum will be opened to you when you sign up for the certification.

Public Discussion of Marine Weather
This section is for students in other courses to ask questions on marine weather. It is good to skim through this discussion at some point, but when enrolled in the weather course it is best to use the Student Discussion Forum for your new questions. As a student in the Weather Course with a question on radar, for example, you would not have access to the Radar Student Discussion forum, but you could post questions in the Public Discussion of Radar.

To start work on the course, you would typically—

(1) Go to the Marine Weather Classroom and read the first topic there, which is called Notes on marine weather course operations.

(2) Then go on to Lesson 1 for assignments within the textbooks and the Weather Trainer.

(3) Then print out the two Practice quizzes for Lesson 1 and use them as a work form as you read though the assignments, filling in the answers as you find them. You will find that this first quiz asks you to practice searching the ebooks and the discussion groups for special topics, since that process is so important to program.

(4) If you cannot find the answer to any of the questions by searching the weather trainer and searching the textbooks, try a search of the Student discussion forum, and if that find your answer, then please post a question in that same forum.

(5) When the quizzes are filled out and you feel you are done with the materials of this lesson, then submit your answers to the quiz to be graded by an instructor, and move on to Lesson 2. Once a quiz is graded, you will receive notification by email, and then the solutions to that quiz will be available to you. See quiz solutions page.

At the end of the course, you have the option to sign up for an optional certification test. Passing this test provides a certificate and logbook stickers to document your work. Certification is described here.

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Notes on Internet Browsers and the Online Course

(1) You can use any browser of your choice for the online course, but you may find that FireFox is a more convenient browser for the online courses. It has convenient live spell checking as you type questions to the instructor, and its use of tabbed windows is preferred by many users.

(2) You can search any page with Ctrl + F, but this function is case sensitive. Search for cat will not find Cat.

(3) You can zoom pages with [Ctrl] + [+] or [-], or [0] to go back to default zoom.

(4) Right click gives the option to go Forward or Backward through the History of pages visited.

(5) We have set up a special function inside the online courses in that [Ctrl] + [1] should type a degree sign (°) whenever you are typing into a Starpath form.