Created in 1988, company Weather Consult was the first private weather company in France. She mainly developed paid forecasting services for professionals, leaving the public service Météo France to take care of the free forecasts for the general public. Meteo Consult is best known in the field of ocean racing, where it gained an almost exclusive dominance.
Become a subsidiary of Prosodie in 2000, it buys La Chaine Météo in 2006, then it was itself bought by the Le Figaro group at the end of 2008 (¹).
The "La Chaine Météo" application for iPhone appears as soon as 2009 (²). Of impeccable quality and ergonomics, This free app brings forecasts to 10 days, covers towns and beaches, provides video forecasts technical, regional and alerts. Despite its orientation towards the general public, it has been very useful information for coastal boaters.
This year, we are witnessing a complete change of strategy for Météo Consult.
Course change for the shipping forecast
This Spring, Météo Consult has revolutionised its website Marine Forecasts providing forecasts up to 14 days completely free : General situation and frontology, GRIB files charts, interactive chart. Forecasts for 10 offshore areas, 251 coastal areas, 18 nearby waters, 332 Approaches to ports, and full homepage customization. In addition, The creation of an account on the site entitles the holder to receive one marine meteomail per day for the area and at the time of your choice. Hard to find better ! Even advertising remains not very intrusive, Let's hope it lasts…
Weather Consult on iPhone and iPad
The 29 the application Météo Consult Marine iPhone app is now available on the iTunes AppStore, followed the next day by the La Chaine Météo iPad. The forecaster is very strong with these two outstanding and free apps.
La Chaine Météo iPad takes up the principle of personalization of the home page and makes maximum use of the qualities of the screen : increasing number of videos available in full screen, forecast charts Europe, France and Overseas, many international news affecting climate and weather. The improvement in the interface is significant compared to the iPhone version, already very ergonomic and intuitive.
The personalized home page
Videos can be enlarged to full screen
Météo Consult Marine, designed for now only for iPhone, presents an incredible profusion of forecasts and surveys for the whole of Western Europe and the Mediterranean : The division offers no less than 111 Atlantic Zones, from the Shetland Islands to Germany and southern Morocco, and 123 Mediterranean areas from Morocco to Tunisia and from Gibraltar to Turkey.
For each zone, the forecasts are distributed in 4 Chapters : Coastal Bulletins, Coastal Maps, Spots and nearby waters :
- GRIB Files : Average and maximum wind, swell, temperature, Cloudiness and precipitation. Up to 10 days with 3 hours steps.
- Detailed forecasts : wind, pressure, Time conditions, sea state and even SHOM tides. Up to 10 days with 6 hours steps.
In addition, there are the records of observations of more than a hundred semaphores, alert messages by sea zone and for each retail zone, 4 explanations videos 5 satellite and radar animations videos. No less ! And I hope I haven't forgotten anything…
In addition, these forecasts are based on NOAA's GFS and ECMWF's IFS models (³) Reviewed by forecasters, it's a standing KO. for concurrent applications.
It only remains to wait for an iPad version of Meteo Consult Marine wich, No doubt, should have the same qualities as the iPad Weather Channel interface. I do not know what economic impact group Le Figaro hopes to of this avalanche of free applications, but it is a real treat for boaters, and well worth an eulogistic article, Well done !
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(¹) You can read the full history of Météo Consult on web-libre.org
(²) Cited in January 2010 in the article iPhone : my favorite navigation apps
(³) See the entrance Forecasting Models in the Glossary
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