History

The founding partners of the Marine Data Service were contracted to provide a Met. Buoy, Boat and Land Station (AWS) meteorological systems for all of the competing teams in the 2007 America’s Cup in Valencia. After evaluating the various commercially available weather buoy systems on the market, it was found that there was nothing available that could provide the kind of platform stability,  accuracy and reliability that was required, plus all the remotely decent Meteorological Buoys were priced prohibitively high. As such the team were left with no option, but to design and develop their own data buoy system.

Glyn Davies and the Meteorological Data Service team applied a new approach to Meteorological Buoy design by using the design philosophies and technology of the America’s Cup (which is of comparable level to Formula 1 in technological development). This new hi-tech approach allowed the MDS team to design, build, maintain and manage a weather data system that was the first of its kind and subsequently set new standards in accuracy, reliability and detailed information, that are yet to be surpassed.

The Americas Cup race teams initially used the weather buoy information to make critical yacht design decisions and to validate their weather models. As the event progressed, this information was vital in calibrating race yacht instruments and for making race-winning tactical calls. In an event were team budgets run in excess of 100-million Euros, this is no small feat.

Due to the very high accuracy and reliability levels the MDS system achieved, during the course of the Americas Cup a number of enquires where received from the offshore wind and other industries to purchase weather buoys and landstations. Hence we have now gone on to develop a commercially available and even more technologically advanced data buoy and system.