Marine Weather Center

In Weather, Part 4, I talked about how I watched weather while cruising in the Bahamas. In this post I discuss one of the weather resources, the Marine Weather Center (better known as Chris Parker), in more detail.

Chris Parker Services

I knew about Chris Parker when we started planning our Bahamas trip, but I haven’t yet talked about his services, because I hadn’t used them before the trip. Chris Parker provides a number of subscription and free services. You can get general weather advice or weather advice for your specific location or destination. You can receive this information in several formats, including SSB (single-sideband radio), satellite phone, fax and email. In addition, he broadcasts a weather synopsis for Bahamas, Caribbean and US East coast on SSB every Monday through Saturday. You can subscribe to the Marine Weather Center services at different levels:

• SSB Radio
• Daily Emails
• Combo SSB and Email
• Custom Email or Fax
• Phone-in

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We didn’t subscribe to any services for the last trip, but we did try to listen in on his Bahamas weather synopsis. Sometimes we couldn’t catch everything he said so next Bahamas trip we will subscribe to his daily email service.

The SSB Bahamas synopsis starts at about 6:40 am on 4.045 MHz USB and 8.137 MHz USB. We would usually tune in before then and adjust the SSB to get the best reception. We would switch between 4.045 and 8.137  and adjust settings to get the best audio reception. It was not always possible to hear the entire synopsis and sometimes we would have to change frequencies in the middle of the broadcast to hear it.

Chris Parker’s Bahamas Synopsis

When we tune in he is taking calls from subscribing vessels. He tries to prioritize calls by propagation. In other words, he will delay his synopsis if there are vessels calling in who will soon lose contact. He always starts his synopsis asking if there is any emergency traffic. Next, he covers recent observations that are pertinent to the area. Then he covers a five-day synopsis and outlook for the next five days. Then he covers precipitation, winds and seas for northern, central and south Bahamas. Finally, he discusses gulf stream crossings, both east and west.

We would prepare for his broadcast by writing down the  National Weather Service Offshore Forecast for the Bahamas (more on that in a future post). Then we would take notes on differences while he was talking. At the end we would compare notes and try to make sure we didn’t miss anything important. The information on squalls was what we found most useful. We have not found an easy way to get this information any other way.

Tropical Storm Ana

We had our share of squalls while in the Bahamas. A trough of low pressure started forming in the Bahamas the first week of May. This later formed tropical storm Ana, the earliest tropical cyclone on record to make landfall in the US. It was not fun being there with a tropical storm forming overhead. (See Waiting for Weather and Rain, Rain Go Away.) But from a scientific point of view it was quite fascinating. We would not have known about this except for Chris Parker.

What’s Next

We relied on Chris Parker’s synopsis more than we thought we would. We will definitely subscribe to his daily email service for the next Bahamas trip. In the next post on I will discuss receiving weather faxes.