I'm just starting to look at using qtVLM for the
route planning for our upcoming Indian
Ocean crossing and I'm very impressed so far.
However, have a problem with RTOFS currents. As a test, I'm trying to plan a
route from North West
Madagascar to Richards Bay in
South Africa. I'm obtaining GFS and RTOFS from saildocs. The GFS is 14 days and I'm putting that in Grib slot 1. The RTOFS is going into Grib 2 slot.
Unfortunately, the RTOFS is only for 5 days so I think that this means that on a 12 day
passage the ocean currents aren't being used by qtLVM for the last 7 days of the
passage. This is actually where the currents are strongest and significant.
I've noticed that the ocean currents in the
Madagascar Channel don't vary significantly from day to day, so a work-around might be to take day 5 from the RTOFS grib file and copy it to Days 6 - 14....
Any comments or suggestions? Anyone know of any Windows based tools to allow me to manipulate GRIB files?