British Olympic Sailing Team Meteorologist Fiona Campbell gives us an introduction to the Olympics and the weather associated with the games.

Meteorological Support in Athens

At the time of writing this, Monday 26th July, there are less than 18 days to go before the first sailing race of the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens.

By then each member of the British Sailing team will have already worked for two to three hundred days, equating to over 1000 sailing hours, and almost double that amount working on shore in a variety of areas. These areas include health and fitness, diet and nutrition, sail and boat design, boat preparation and the weather.

My day as RYA meteorologist begins in Athens at around 6am, not long before the rest of the team heads off to the gym for their first of two sessions a day. All available current and past weather data is gathered from our archives and from various sources on the internet and is put together to form the days forecast. This is delivered to the team during our morning meeting. This forecast is constantly updated and added too as the day progresses and the local wind patterns begin to form.

The sailors can then use the forecast to plan their sail choice and choose what tactics they will adopt during the race. My aim is to not only accurately predict the wind strength and direction to within a few minutes throughout the day, but I also aim to ensure that the sailors understand why the weather does what it does and how to recognise and adapt to changes.

Hamish Wilcox, the 470 coach, an experienced sailor and weather team member for three previous Americas Cups, helps to explain in sailing terms what is going on. At the end of a long day on the water, and possibly a few hours boat work followed by another gym session, the team gathers to share the information they have learnt during the day.

Helping me is a team of sailors, coaches and a variety of technical specialists. In addition to weather data provided to the Olympic Teams by the Greek Meteorological Office we have installed, with the technical help of Richard Russell, our own wind instruments close to the sailing area. These have been recording data 24 hours a day for the last three years. On-the-water coaches, sailors and the weather team have been gathering weather data using a variety of hand-held anemometers, simple cloud and wind observations, as well as more high-tech electronic equipment.

All the data is combined to give a detailed picture of the local conditions to be expected on the water during August. In 2000 the only information the team had to rely on was snippets of folklore from the locals who said it would be unbearably hot with a strong offshore dry wind. Our data proves this can be expected, but not 100% of the time. Up to 50% of races could take place in a very light onshore moist wind.

Sometimes the locals do know best though, as Mike Molyneux a member of the RYA Olympic Met Support team recalls:

"Part of the job of the Met support team is to measure conditions and find out if local knowledge is correct. Sometimes we can determine details that aren't apparent, but sometimes the locals do know best. One perfect sunny afternoon in Savannah we were observing conditions by the sailing site surrounded by power boaters. The cumulus started to grow and one clap of thunder had the locals leaving frantically. The cool boxes, toys and children were loaded in no time. Why were we left on our own so quickly? We found out moments later as the wind arrived, some of the gusts recorded were reaching over 50 knots!"

In depth weather knowledge of the highly variable and localised winds in Athens is one of the aspects we, the British Olympic sailing team, hope will help the UK become the most successful sailing nation, should we win more medals than the USA this August.

Other features in this series
Weather and the Olympics
Introduction to weather and sailing in the Olympics
The Winds in Athens
Weather and Tactics

Back to Olympics 2004

Other related BBC Weather articles
Sailing and Weather
The Boat Race 2004
Being Weatherwise for sailing

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Skye Weather
Richard Paul Russell Limited
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