Weather Wonders

New services help keep you updated on changes in

the weather by tapping into better forecast data and alerts.

By Doug Thompson

Before electricity, forecasting weather was easy—you looked in all directions, stuck a wet thumb in the air and went with your gut. Trick knees and sinus-pressure headaches counted, too; as did unusual animal movements or a “feeling” Aunt Alice had that it was going to rain.
Then along came weather radios—and a monotone voice on the WX Channel imparting valuable information. And the WX channel still works very well, except now there’s a lot more competition, and it’s become seriously high tech. Sirius Marine Weather and XM WX Satellite Weather offer valuable services and have been integrated to work well with multifunction displays from leading marine electronics manufacturers.
Boat owners benefit from improving technology in two important areas. First, the technology used by the National Weather Service (NWS)  and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is constantly improving as more satellites are put into space and weather-monitoring devices are placed on land and in the sea. Nearly all the data that’s used by Sirius Marine Weather and XM WX Satellite Weather, the WX Channel and your local TV station is supplied by the NWS and NOAA.
Second, how the weather information is delivered is improving rapidly. The various manufacturers of multifunction displays (including Furuno, Garmin, Lowrance, Raymarine, and Simrad) take the weather feeds from Sirius Marine Weather and XM WX Satellite Weather and display it with nuances tailored to your needs. Various features from Sirius Marine Weather and XM WX Satellite Weather include weather radar, lightning reports, storm tracking and buoy reports, including water temperature and wave heights.
It’s important to note that Sirius XM only passes along data; it does not collect it. The NWS and NOAA data is put through a quality control process by Baron Services on the XM side, and by WSI (a Weather Channel company) for Sirius, prior to distribution. Then the individual electronics manufacturers overlay the weather data on their screens to produce information you can use while on the water.
For example, the Lowrance HDS-10 automatically tunes the screen’s color palette to reveal crucial temperature breaks for anglers using the feed from Sirius Marine Weather, as well as eddies in sea-surface temperatures.
Two manufacturers also have improved the receivers that take in the weather-data feeds from Sirius Marine Weather. Second-generation receivers from Furuno and Raymarine combine the receiver with a multi-port hub which serves as a network backbone. The one unit does double duty both as a weather receiver and network hub.
Another company that uses data from the NWS and NOAA is Baron Services (which quality controls the marine-weather data for XM), parent company of marine supplier WxWorx. Baron Services is now offering Baron QuikLink, a subscription-based marine weather data service.
Supplying graphical marine-weather information over virtually any internet connection, QuikLink provides coverage across the continental United States and southern Canada with pricing tiers starting at just $14.99 per month. Information delivered includes high-resolution NEXRAD radar, wave heights, storm tracking, high-resolution sea surface temperatures, buoy observations, surface wind speed, and more. More information is available at baronservices.com/quiklink.
Also, WxWorx is now supplying super-resolution Sea Surface Temperature (SST) data to the XM WX Satellite Weather service. The enhanced SST data is immediately available at no extra charge to subscribers of the Master Mariner data package. Compatible with most PCs, WxWorx on Water is the first XM WX-enabled software capable of displaying the higher resolution SST dataset. Support for the new SST data will be enabled through a free software update now available on wxworx.com.
While other sea temperature data products can have gaps caused by clouds and missed satellite passes, the new dataset is derived from multiple satellite sources, employing advanced mathematical models of the atmosphere and oceans to predict missing temperature values and fill in any gaps.