Ports and harbours are busy places where scheduling and timings are crucial. The weather can cause logistical and financial disruption, as well as impact customer satisfaction.

Comfort of ferry passengers, safe delivery of cargo, and arrival and departure times can all be affected by the weather. However, by using our expert forecasts to help you make operational decisions, you can monitor and assess the risk of wind, wave, visibility and temperatures.

How the Met Office can help

Through our detailed site-specific forecasts, we can help you reduce your exposure to uncertainty, giving you confidence to make the right operational decisions to maximise safety and efficiency.

Services

We offer:

• Hourly weather updates through our nowcast facility on Safesee (our online weather delivery system).
• Site-specific text and tab and graph forecasts giving a detailed picture of the weather conditions in your port/harbour.
• Warnings for severe weather conditions.

Safesee

Whatever marine industry or environment you work in, we can help you reduce your exposure to uncertainty and give you the confidence to make the right decisions.

Designed specifically for the marine and offshore industries, Safesee is a new web-based forecast delivery system that makes weather information easier to interpret and aids operational decision making.

Improve your operations

Safesee enables you to see a wide array of marine weather information and bespoke Met Office forecast services, as well as the facility to monitor the latest weather conditions.

It has been designed to enable the import of the most up-to-date information and innovative operational tools to ensure that projects can be completed as safely as possible, despite the weather.

 

• Access to hourly forecasts to maximise weather opportunities, and to minimise potential weather downtime
• At-a-glance ‘traffic light summary’ of weather impact on all sites for the next five days
• Global map navigation with the ability to add weather layers, bringing the weather to life
• Tools that enable you to overlay your own operational thresholds on forecasts so you can easily identify weather opportunities or potential hazardous conditions
• Visualisation of site-specific metocean forecast information on sea level, surge and currents
• Performance monitoring — the facility to import your own observations and visualise against the forecast
• Supporting weather charts, satellite pictures, weather radar and airfield weather to help your understanding of potential weather and guide wider logistic operations

For more information about how the Met Office can help, please email them on: marine@metoffice.gov.uk

 

Forecast for Winter 2008/9

Temperature

Winter temperatures are more likely to be above normal over much of the European region. However, this winter is likely to be less mild than last winter, when above-average temperatures were widespread.

For the UK as a whole, winter-mean temperatures are more likely to be above normal. Although a winter milder than the 1971-2000 average is favoured, temperatures are likely to be lower than those experienced last year.

Rainfall

For much of northern Europe, including the UK, rainfall is likely to be lower than observed in last year's relatively wet winter. However, this signal is not sufficient to indicate whether winter precipitation totals are more likely to be above or below the 1971-2000 average.