An Interview with Nick Olson, PredictWind
Pursuant to the blog post on Departure Planning with PredictWind, I was able to connect with Nick Olson, Marketing and Business Development Manager of PredictWind.
The departure planning part of your app/website is a powerful tool for cruisers. How has the feedback been from cruisers? Was there a push from the cruising community to develop something like this?
We have had the Departure planning feature for nearly as long as we have had weather routing. However, there have been some significant improvements to this tool in the last couple of years. Like the weather routing, we take a multi-model approach (with 4 models available out of 6), but in departure planning, we also have a combined and detailed result table. The combined result provides a clear and often cleaner picture of the best departure time. For me, the most significant improvement with this tool has been the inclusion of wave modelling for each vessel. In both departure planning and weather routing, we can now use the vessel’s dimensions to create a 3D model and calculate roll, vertical acceleration, and boat slamming. To do this, we consider the wind wave, primary, secondary, and tertiary swells for every route. This information is then displayed in the departure planning/ weather routing tables, making it easy to compare a rough passage versus a smooth one based on your chosen departure time. The best part is that this can be done for a 30-nautical mile passage with hourly departure steps or a 3000-nautical mile passage with daily departure steps.
I have been using your app for several years, and the systematic changes you have made are quite good. (e.g., Departure planning, AIS, Routing, Wave modeling, “AI” Polars). What is your philosophy/comment on how PredictWind is helping smooth out the complexity of offshore routing?
Weather routing can be incredibly complex, especially with traditional methods. However, with cloud-based routing, we can reduce some of that complexity by eliminating the need to download all data to get a route. Since we already have your vessel details, all we need are the start and finish waypoints. Other factors like depth avoidance, polar percentage, comfort settings and motoring options will remain set in the interface unless changed. Therefore, getting a route can become a very simple task. However, our goal is to provide more than just wind information for the route. We strive to include additional details that aid seamanship, such as ocean current and wave modeling outputs to see how your boat will react to the sea state, AIS to prepare for busy areas or avoid fishing fleets, and extreme weather warnings along the route. Additionally, we have GMDSS forecasts displayed in graphic form, where we use AI machine learning to read all GMDSS forecasts and convert them into images. That way, we can provide our customers with as much information as possible in a simple and digestible manner, helping them make better decisions when it comes to weather.
Your graphics showcasing the weather models is second to none. Talk about your team and how you have gotten PW to this point!
PredictWind is lucky to have a great leader in Jon Bilger, who is relentless in his drive to continually improve PredictWind and empower our team to push the boundaries in this quest. Our development is largely driven by customer feedback and ideas from our own team, who are mostly sailors with experience in offshore racing, coastal and bluewater cruising, Americas Cup campaigns and Olympic events, especially in our customer-facing roles. This has a direct impact on our path to the future and our philosophy about making complex and complicated weather into an easy-to-understand platform for our customers.
What’s next for PW? Are you going to integrate navigational charts?
We can’t give away too much about where we are headed, but we do have a stacked development schedule that we constantly juggle for priority well over a year ahead, and this includes navigation charts, pilot charts and other important new features.