The Eastern Pacific - Pacific Crossing Notes: A Sailor's Guide to the Coconut Milk Run - page 266

Fact File: Weather and Tide Resources for
the Tuamotus
The Tuamotus lie within the French Polynesian time zone: UTC-10.
Accurate tide tables can be downloaded from the French Hydrographic Office (SHOM) [#1] .
There are several weather forecasts available for the archipelago:
Meteo France issues both marine and land forecasts. The forecasts are available from
www.meteo.pf [#2] or on request from Saildocs (send an email to [e-mail] with
no header and the message send fr.poly . Of course, these forecasts are in French, but
the basic vocabulary is easy to decipher.
NOAA Spot Forecasts detail a number of useful weather parameters. Request by sending
an email to [e-mail] with an arbitrary subject line and the following message
body:
send Spot:16.1S,145.7W|7,3|PRMSL,WIND,WAVES,RAIN,LFTX
This example requests a 7 day forecast at 3 hour intervals ( |7,3| ) for the location
16°06'S 145°42'W ( 16.1S,145.7W ), including sea level pressure ( PRMSL ), average
wind speed and direction ( WIND ), significant wave height, swell direction and period
( WAVES ), precipitation ( RAIN ), and Lifted Index ( LFTX , a measure of instability in the at-
mosphere). You can alter each data point as needed, keeping in mind that positions must be
specified in decimal degrees (rather than minutes) to one decimal point.
NADI Fleet Codes are synoptic charts issued by Fiji's meteorological service that cover the
southwest Pacific. Send a message to [e-mail] with send fleet.nadi in
the message body or subscribe fleet.nadi for a fourteen-day subscription with
daily delivery. To display these fleet codes as synoptic charts, you will need a free, small
software application called PhysPlot which can be downloaded here [#3] .
[#1] http://www.shom.fr/en/services/tidal-predictions/predictions-en-ligne/
[#2] http://www.meteo.pf
[#3] http://www.pangolin.co.nz/physplot