How to get started with GRIB2 Weather forecasts in Maritime

At Spire Maritime we never stop innovating and as a customer-focused enterprise, we never stop talking to our customers. Along the way this year, we learned that although GRIB2 is a standard meteorological data format, many of our clients had never used it and they had a few questions about how to use it and how to get the most value out of it in a maritime context.

This led us to realize that there is very little support out there on using GRIB2 format for maritime applications. Other GRIB2 tutorials and help documents focus on expert users, but we struggled to find comprehensive guides for beginners and specific use cases. Since we were already helping our customers regularly with this, it made sense for us to publish these tutorials and share them with the wider maritime community.

Spire’s tutorials chart a course for beginners and intermediate data users, intended to help make using our data quick and easy, so our customers can start seeing the benefits of working with our data almost instantly.

Access the GRIB2 tutorial here

Enabling the data advantage means we want to deliver data that is highly customized, easy to access, and accurate. Unlocking the value of our data for our clients reduces the barriers to entry, minimizes technical overhead, and shifts the focus to delivering and creating game-changing products and solutions.

Spire tutorials require a basic understanding of the Python programming language. We also created a public Github repository with various weather code samples, but the benefit of the tutorials is that they walk the user through the implementation process and explain the decisions being made along the way. For those who prefer to dive right into the working code, we include the complete Python script at the end of each tutorial.

It’s all ready to go and just requires the client’s data inputs.

Created by Spire Sales Engineer, Elliott Wobler, the driving force behind creating the tutorials was the desire to remove the barriers of entry for using data and make it accessible and easy to understand. “I want the tutorials to help people understand that they shouldn’t be afraid of scientific data formats like GRIB2,” Wobler said. GRIB2 becomes an extremely powerful tool for working with global weather data and while some client applications still only require Spire Weather’s Point Forecast API, Wobler sees value in giving clients the option to work with global GRIB2 data and hopes his tutorials will make people feel comfortable doing so.

“The goal is to make weather data as accessible as possible for anyone who is concerned about climate change and wants to develop sustainable solutions that help our planet” Elliott Wobler

With the primary driver behind the tutorials enabling faster development of client solutions, look for Spire Weather to create additional tutorials in the future. “We’re always open to suggestions for tutorial ideas that our clients would find particularly helpful,” said Wobler. “I look forward to hearing more about inspiring solutions built with our data.”
We would also be interested to know if a video tutorial or regular webinar workshops would help you make the most of our data.

See our full collection of tutorials here