Bob Blog 17 April

Bob Blog 17 April
Bob McDavitt's ideas for sailing around the South Pacific.
Disclaimer: Weather is a mix of pattern and chaos; these ideas are from the
patterned world.

Compiled Sunday 17 April 2022
A few weeks ago I shared a link to a tutorial on Windy.com's great "distance
and planning" tool.
Sadly, this no longer works as before, Windy.com seems to be in the middle
of upgrade and the timer slide doesn't work anymore. I've reported this as a
bug and it may return as a feature.

MJO
The MJO (Madden Julian oscillation) was named in 1971, when Roland Madden
and Paul Julian discovered a pulse of extra energy that travels eastwards
along the tropics from Indian Ocean to Pacific Ocean. It is a regional scale
coupling between atmospheric circulation and tropical convection. It is
known to increase the risk of cyclone formation and can be tracked watching
cloud and rain patterns.

A good site to see its extrapolated trend is
www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/MJO/foregfs.shtml, scroll down
to Ensemble map of the OLR (outgoing long wave radiation) anomolies. Here,
blue is bubbly and yellow is mellow. The current MJO will be the last for
this South Pacific cyclone and moved into the South Pacific about 10 days
ago helping to encourage cyclone FILI between New Caledonia and NZ. The
diagram shows MJO is now rapidly fading.

TROPICS
FILI travelled quickly southeast and sideswiped North Island East coast last
Tuesday/Wednesday bringing some strong wind and heavy rain. There are no
cyclones around now and even the areas of potential development are
shrinking.

WEATHER ZONES
SPCZ=South Pacific ConvL1ergence zone.
The SPCZ stretches from PNG to Vanuatu/Fiji. Waves of showers are expected
to travel northwards across Fiji and Tonga/Samoa.
A convergence zone /trough is expected to linger over Society and Austral
Islands this week.

HIGHS and LOWS
A High H1 east of NZ is expected to become a BFH Big Fat High to over 1032
travelling slowly along40S, feeding east to Northeast winds onto northern NZ

Low L1 near Norfolk Island is expected to travel only slowly ESE until
mid-week and then more quickly southeast to east of Northland. Associated
front should cross North Island on Mon/Tue.

A trough over Tasmania tonight should reach southern NZ by Tuesday and clear
North Island by end of Thursday to merge with L1. This should be followed by
a southwest flow.

High H2 is expected to travel across Tasmania by Tuesday and then northeast
into central Tasman Sea .

L1 is helping trips from New Caledonia to Fiji.
H2 is expected to help trips from New Caledonia to Australia.
After Tuesday it will be difficult to sail from Queensland to New Zealand
this week.
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If you would like more detail for your voyage, then check metbob.com to see
what I offer.
Or Facebook at /www.facebook.com/metbobnz/
Weathergram with graphics is at metbob.wordpress.com (subscribe/unsubscribe
at bottom).
Weathergram archive (with translator) is at weathergram.blogspot.co.nz.
Contact is bob@metbob.com or txt 64277762212
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