Weather Routing

Weather Routing computes a route between ports over the real shipping-lane network and lays the marine forecast along it, so you can see the weather the ship will meet and pick a departure that avoids the worst of it.

The screen

The planning bar at the top: origin, destination, up to four via waypoints, a departure control (Now, +6h, +12h, +24h or a custom time), a speed box (4 to 25 knots), Compute, and a Lanes menu of fourteen preset trade lanes. The header keeps your Favourites and Recent routes.

The chart fills the screen. Two drawers slide out: Route on the left (summary: stress, distance, legs, weather points, and a forecast-confidence pill) and Warnings on the right. The icon rail offers weather layers (wind, precipitation, pressure, clouds, air temperature), thresholds, the forecast hour, and route export. There is a flat/globe toggle, a wind-field overlay, a ports layer and a legend.

Computing and comparing

1. Pick origin and destination (and any via points), set departure and speed.
2. Compute. The route appears with the forecast along it.
3. The departure matrix lists alternative departures with ETA, maximum wind and maximum significant wave height. Click a row to adopt that departure; the route recomputes for it.
4. Compare candidate routes takes your speed, bunker price, consumption, daily running cost, freight, cargo and port costs, and ranks the strategies by distance, days, tolls, bunker, total cost, net result and the CII effect. Its own note says the figures are not broker-grade; use them to rank options, not to fix a rate.

Exporting

Download GPX is available now. RTZ and a performance defence pack are listed as coming.

What it will and won't do

• Compute needs at least two waypoints.
• Weather can be partial. The page says exactly how many sample points failed and tells you to compute again to fill the gaps. If the weather service returns nothing, the route is still computed; only the weather is missing.
• With no route, the warnings drawer says "Compute a route to see warnings." A clean route says "No warnings — clear window."