Further to my “discovery£ that Weatheronline provides the UK Met Office meso-scale wind vectors, I have now found that COAMPS forecasts can be obtained in GRIB format for the Mediterranean, British Isles, Biscay, the North Sea and Scandinavia.
COAMPS has been available in Browser form from www.passageweather.com for some while now. However, using the Saildocs email service COAMPS GRIBs are available. Send an email to query@saildocs.com. The message should read (with appropriate changes of area)
send coamps:51N,49N,05W,01E|0.2,0.2|0,03,...,72|wind
That will result in an email with a GRIB file for the area shown. Winds will be at 0.2 degree spacing, at 3 hour intervals up to 72 hours. The interval can be 3,6,12 hours and the time period up to 72 hours. The GRIB file can be opened by some GRIB viewers eg ExpeditionLT, UGrib and Viewfax but not zyGrib. See http://weather.mailasail.com/Franks-Weather/Grib-File-Viewers. Be careful if using this over a mobile phone, file sizes can get large. See the example attached.
To get the formatting correct, I suggest that users should copy the message above and insert their own area etc.
COAMPS is the US Navy Coupled Ocean Atmosphere Meso-scale Prediction System. It is probably not as sophisticated as the UK meso-scale models but uses more data than most (maybe all) commercial meso-scale models.
The advantage of using GRIB files over a browser is for ease of saving for later reference.