Shipmasters who have used shore-based weather routing advice for over two decades might agree when I say that there is perhaps a deterioration in standards in the past few years. I'm not quite sure why. Of course, this requires the shipmaster to be less reliant on merely one source of prediction,and to make his own diligent study of evolving conditions.
Having worked the north-Pacific and north-Atlantic ocean routes over several years, esp during winters, I find that the rapid evolution of climate-change induced meteorological conditions is also creating some sort of a gap between what is predicted and what is encountered. This is puzzling because as time goes by, weather prediction algorithms - on which the prognosis and extended outlook are based - would have surely improved immensely, so why is the advisory service not keeping pace?
Does it have something to do with who exactly is interpreting data, is it a senior analyst or marine professional with several years of interpreting and disseminating routing advice, or is it a less-experienced analyst who is sending you the advice? Which comes down to training and competence of shore-based analysts. This could be a plausible reason.
Owners should ask specific questions of routing service providers to gather information about the methodology that backs their advisories. Invite some of their representatives for the occasional interaction with seafarers, this might help. But performance feedback of weather routing service providers needs to be elicited and acted upon. After all, this is a paid service!
Container vessels trading between China-US across Pacific are currently crossing eastbound in about 2 weeks, and westbound in about 2-4 weeks, depending upon just-in-time and inventory requirements.I have found the preliminary voyage routing (advisory #1) to be so predictable in the past 5-6 years - at times it appears very little consideration has been given to weather beyond 2-3 days! This results in voyage deviations and resultant much higher fuel consumption and longer distance than originally envisaged.
On the vessel side, the Bridge Team need to step up their game and monitor as many sources as we possibly can when crossing the ocean. In the Sino-Japanese basin, one has found the JMA website extremely useful,with its hourly updates during stormy weather. The free radio-fax charts from NOAA continue to be an excellent resource, having provided valuable service to mariners for over 15 years on both the USEC and USWC.
No comments:
Post a Comment