Coastal cruisers, how do you decide when to take the boat out? Sunny weekend? VHF weather forecast? How about the tides? Is there a front blowing in? Wouldn’t it be great to have a way to see wind, tides, currents, and your favorite ports in one intuitive picture? That’s the aim of the Boater Information System, a very cool research project of the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington.
Patrick over at Ship’s Record spotted this neat online navigation planning tool. It’s a full-blown web application which overlays wind, tides, currents over a map of the Pacific Northwest, and even shows you animated versions of the forecast data. The project is paid for by a grant from the Washington Sea Grant Program, with an emphasis on understanding how boaters use navigation and weather information.
I’m personally impressed, as I have a software design background, and the Boater Information System which the team has created is surprisingly friendly and attractively designed (in my experience, not many projects coming out of academia make it to this level). They’ve done their homework on task analysis and user-centered design. I even enjoy the somewhat eccentric visual design, which makes me think old ships and board games. Worth a look!
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I’ve been using this site for about a month. I check it daily for the winds. We’ve never not gone on a Vessel Assist call because of weather, our rates (and risk) do rise with weather.
That is very cool. I wish it had someplace useful for me, like the Bay Area.
I remembering seeing something like that somwhere but not as nice.
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