Geolocated METOC Forecast Service

Here we provide a service which lets you access METOC (meteorological and oceanographic) forecasts for exactly the locations and times that you are interested in. But to do that we need to know the location for which you want the forecast.

Our users are operating in many different environments. We have therefore chosen to make a number of different user interfaces which you can use to access the forecasts. All of our web pages are available in both encrypted and plain text form. It should however be noted that we are currently using an external service for getting the map tiles used in our map interface (see below). This map tile service is only available over a normal unencrypted internet connection.

Geolocated forecasts are extracted at exactly the points that you want them for. Due to the inherent uncertainty in this type of forecasts it is recommended to combine these forecasts with other forecasts which give a general overview of the weather. This is especially true for weather parameters with high spatial variability like currents and waves. See also our disclaimer.

Map Interface

You can access the forecasts by clicking on a zoomable map (like Google Maps). This is convenient if you want to check the weather at locations without having to specify the exact longitude and latitude of that position. A drawback is that it works best when you have a decent internet connection.

Automatic Identification System Interface

If you want forecasts for a specific ship which is equipped with an enabled Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponder you can use our AIS interface which lets you type in the ships Maritime Mobile Service Identity (MMSI) number and we will retrieve the ships last known position from our AIS database and provide forecasts for that position. This interface is very useful if you have limited bandwidth.

We are currently only providing this service for the North Sea and Baltic Seas.

Geolocation Interface

Web browsers have a feature called geolocation. We have a user interface which requests your location from your computer. A number of different sources are used to attempt to obtain the user’s location, and each has their own varying degree of accuracy. A desktop browser is likely to use WiFi (accurate to 20m) or IP Geolocation which is only accurate to the city level and can provide false positives. Mobile devices tend to use triangulation techniques such as GPS (accurate to 10m and only works outside), WiFi and GSM/CDMA cell IDs (accurate to 1000m). This interface is also useful if you have limited bandwidth.

Text Form Interface

The final interface that we support is a simple text form interface where you simply type in the position that you want forecasts from. Useful if your bandwidth is limited.

Web Application Programming Interface

You can include our forecast data or images on your own web site or in your own application by using our simple Web API. Images can be included on a web page using a simple <img> tag while other information can be accessed using a JSON based API. See details in our API documentation