The first thing to know is that “Weather 101, Basics” is a science course. Its goal is to prepare boaters for a second course launching later this year called “Weather 202, Advanced.” Taken together, these classes are designed
The first thing to know is that “Weather 101, Basics” is a science course. Its goal is to prepare boaters for a second course launching later this year called “Weather 202, Advanced.” Taken together, these classes are designed to teach boaters to become their own weather forecasters.
It may be science, but that doesn’t mean that the principles of weather cannot be rendered using plain language. When veteran marine forecaster Chris Parker talks about the weight of atmosphere, he’ll let you know that “air is pretty heavy.” Discussing energy transfer on a global scale, Parker notes, “There’s more friction on land...so there is less wind.” What is a front? “A front is simply a leading edge between dissimilar air masses,” he answers.
Parker has been advising cruising boaters for more than 15 years, earning a reputation for precision forecasting, initially in the Bahamas and Caribbean Sea. For example, the Exumas are an archipelago in the Bahamas that is 130 miles long, yet Parker’s forecasts divide these islands into northern, central and southern sectors for localized predictions. Nobody else cuts it so fine.
Today his weather routing is world-wide. In fact, while we were taping this course, Parker was shepherding two boats across the Pacific.
“Weather 101, Basics” is a course for ambitious cruisers, who want the knowledge to perform reality checks on forecasts received from afar and the ability to craft their own when onboard technology goes dark.
MODULE 1, Energy Basics
- Weather is Earth's mechanism to redistribute energy
- Atmosphere has weight (mass, momentum)
- Warm air rises
- Moist air has latent (potential) warmth
- Air moves horizontally and vertically
- Basic concepts like convergence/divergence
- Motion of air, Coriolis effect
- Energy transfer occurs on many scales, here we discuss Global Scale energy transfer
MODULE 2, Synoptic-Scale Meteorology
- Air-mass classification
- High and Low-pressure systems
- Fronts & Trofs
- Front & Front summary
MODULE 3, Folklore
- Red sky at night
- Red sky in morning
- Halo rings moon or sun
- Mackerel sky and mares’ tails
MODULE 4, The Spin Zone
- Upper-air weather and how it influences surface weather and patterns
- Convergence and Divergence in 3-dimensions
- Vorticity (spin)
- Identifying upper-air (500-millibar) patterns and their surface effects
- Real world example of upper-TROF triggering a (non-Tropical) Hurricane Force Low pressure system.
MODULE 5, Forecast resources
· Weather Bell
· Tropical tidbits
· Spot weather
· Sirius XM
· Weather apps on mobile device
We kid you not. When Chris Parker was four, his ambition was to be a TV weatherman. He even studied Meteorology for a couple years at college in Vermont, but he ended up with a degree in Business.
Parker grew up in a boating family, however, and it got the best of him. In mid-career, he chucked his business life to cruise the East Coast, Bahamas and Caribbean. For 12 years, he and his partner and Wizard the cat lived like seagoing gypsies. “We took pride in traveling an average of 5,000 miles each year while burning an average of about 50 gallons of diesel,” he says. “We almost always sailed from place to place, and often sailed on and off anchor.”
Parker tells the story of why he came back to his childhood dream of growing up a