Brand new internet weather website

www.windguru.com is great if your area is there.

As for a good site, it needs to be accurate and displayed in a clear method all can understand, no bar graph things.

So - Sun - Wind Direction - Wind speed - Cloud cover etc are all required in a picture format.

Forecasts I currently use are

*Weather Online (http://www.weatheronline.co.uk/sail.htm)

I like it because it gives weather a regular (3 hourly) intervals for the next seven days. It's great for offshore racing as it covers a whole sea area (we tend to race to Belgium/Holland/France from the UK) and it's good for inshore because on monday morning I can get a clue about next weekend and see how it develops during the week. One great bonus is that the site is simple enough to render well on a blackberry which is useful when away from a computer. And it's free!

*Accuweather ( http://ukie.accuweather.com/ukie/sailing-forecast.asp?partne r=accuweather)

This is great because it's so local and the felixstowe data is smack where I do my racing most weekends. It's pretty accurate too with data for several parts of each day. I'd like it to be more long range of course but it's fine as it is. It's also free which is great.

I guess what I like is

-specific info, several points in a day

-accuracy (obviously)

-price

Have a look at Chimet on the HISC website. It give actual windspeed/direction, plus a graph of the last few hours. Don't think you can get a more useful local site.

-Top Wind speeds
-Take too long to load on windows 98 (I'm a cheapskate really)
-less fancy side panels
-More Inland focus

The perfect forecast needs to be accurate. So a model which handles gradient, sea breeze and topographical effects. It also needs to be precise by in terms of time and location. However due to the nature of weather you would never achieve a perfect model... So you would be better producing a very good one for a small area (for example Weymouth in preparation for 2012).