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Routing Ships
Wed Oct 08, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
I'm Bryan Yeaton for the Weather Notebook. It used to be that ships sailed routes based on
lines around the Earth called Great Circles. Robin White reports these days they're more
likely to plot a course following lines on the weather map.
At Weather News International in Sunnyvale, California, meteorologists track not just storms,
but about a 1000 ships at a time. On a computer screen, Jack Katona is following a small
freighter from Vancouver, British Columbia.
Katona: Every 12 hours at what I look at here, I can see what the wind conditions are going to
be. I take a look at the swell conditions - what's going to be affecting that vessel.
Katona plots a course to Japan and sends it to the ship by email. The route keeps the ship out
of trouble from the weather because sailing through storms can lead to costly delays and
detours.
Katona: A ship can't get out of the way of something just like that it takes a couple of days
to get ‘em deviated around a low sytem that's developing
Sometimes Katona suggests that ships go up into the Bering Sea near Alaska in the middle of
winter. He can tell from the forecast that that's going to be the best crossing. At first this
was a hard sell - especially with older captains.
Katona: The old captains' thinking was I go North. There's nothing good up North. North in
the wintertime - bad.
Captains are free to ignore the advice - Katona says they're an independent bunch. But for the
most part they go along because the weather-based ship routing saves companies thousands of
dollars in fuel and labor, and even lost cargo.
The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory. It is supported by
Subaru and The National Science Foundation. Thanks today to our executive engineer, Sean
Doucette and our Marketing Manager, Melody Nester.
Today's Links
Weathernews International for the United States
http://www.us.weathernews.com/
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