Post by
YourMomSA | 2019-09-02 | 15:28:56
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Forecast_System
http://zezo.org/qa.html
2.9 06z means "September 2 at 0600 zulu", which is 6 AM UTC.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/capitalweathergang/2009/03/meteorologists_and_their_zany.html
So... each column reflects the most recent GFS weather updates. The leftmost is the most recent. Then the rows show you the predicted time required to sail to the goal that Cvetan has designated for this race. By retaining the historical data in the other columns, instead of just showing the most recent, he's giving us visibility into the evolution of the forecast, which also gives us an idea of which start times have potential to do notably better (or worse) than the most recent forecast, and which appear to be quite stable.
I'm not certain what Cvetan has set as a destination for the predicted times analysis in this race. I think Ponta de Pedras. But of course if you decide to pass that point significantly East of the actual point, it may not be the optimal destination. The other thing he'll probably want to adjust after his vacation is the color coding. Normally it fades from red to green as the times start to look good, but I think a "good time" is currently designated as something well under 200 hours, so it's showing everything as red. I'm not sure what timing would be particularly good. The 214's showing later this week seem pretty good... although I suspect that at some point in the next 2-3 weeks, we'll see a storm system that stays more in the middle of the Atlantic and less close to the US shoreline, which would give a longer run of high speed sailing for this course... so it may be that we should be looking for more like 190 hours.
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