NEW ZEALAND
The 36th America’s Cup demonstrated that the AC75 foiling monohulls are marvels of technology able to defy physics by flying around the racetrack at unprecedented speeds, yet unable to defy mother nature, which has the power to humble them with too much or too little wind. Starved of breeze, they flop belly down in the water and slow to a crawl. Too much wind and they can fly out of control, bows pointing to the sky before toppling into a capsize. Amid all the wizardry behind these outlandish machines the team weathermen have to combine science with interpretive art to wrestle the mercurial forces of temperature, pressure, humidity, cloud formation and wind into a prediction sailors can rely on to plot their strategies. For Emirates Team New Zealand’s weatherman, Roger Badham – universally known as ‘Clouds’ – this was his 10th America’s Cup. It was also his last. Badham will now retreat to his redoubt in the Australian bush and leave the Cup world behind. When he started forecasting for the America’s Cup did he ever imagine boats doing 50kt around the track? ‘Never in a million years,’ he laughs. ‘The progression has been very fast from San Francisco (2013) to Bermuda (2017) and back to Auckland,’ he says of the period since foiling entered the picture. Fast or slow, however, the fundamentals remain the same. ‘You still have to match race and you still have to get the wind shifts and pressure changes right, but now it is happening very fast. You are in it and then you are out of it.’
Weather prediction is part of the game right from the outset of a new America’s Cup cycle when design teams start to model the anticipated conditions. Especially accounting for climate change, one wonders how relevant historical data is. ‘Climate change shows in many ways,’ he replies. ‘You get slightly more extremes, the frequency of days in a certain condition will change; while tropical cyclones and lows do not change much in frequency, they can be more intense. But the overall patterns remain pretty much the same. El Niño and La Niña years can show more variability than anything related to climate change.’
He has been studying Auckland’s weather ever since Team New Zealand won the Cup in 1995 and began preparations for the 2000 defence. ‘We have been collecting good data across that time. It is all still relevant, but there are subtle changes.’ In fact, he says he has spent more time studying Auckland than anywhere else in the world, including his Sydney hometown.
Despite a wide perception that Auckland can deliver four seasons in a day, if not an hour, he says it is actually not particularly chal- lenging for a meteorologist. ‘It is narrow and it has its peculiarities like any other place. You learn them and you deal with them. In terms of the Cup, San Diego was probably the most difficult venue. ‘Bermuda also had its challenges. It is just a dot in the Atlantic Ocean. That makes it easy in one sense, but more difficult in another sense, because it is a landmass that corrupts an otherwise unin- terrupted flow. And you had these little micro sea breezes that used to occur. You learn them and deal with them.
‘One of the most important changes for the 2021 regatta in Auckland was shifting the racing to the late afternoon. Back in 2000 we had virtually a week of no racing because the schedule called for racing between 1pm and 3pm. That is a dreadful time, when the west coast and east coast sea breezes are cancelling each other out. At 3pm, just when they were cancelling racing, the west coast breeze would start to come in and we had a nice south - westerly, when all the boats were back in the shed.’ In the 2003 Auckland regatta the danger of pitching design decisions too far in one direction was exposed when the expected light conditions failed to materialise. The New Zealand defence collapsed in humiliation when NZL-81 could not cope with blustery easterlies and boisterous Hauraki Gulf sea conditions. ‘That episode sits in the mind, for sure,’ says Badham. ‘It might be human nature to want to hedge bets in one direction or another, but it is hard to do that here. You must have an all-round boat. Auckland has sea breezes at both the low and high end. Statistically the data shows you can encounter all conditions in any one or two-week period. ‘During racing my day started around 6am,’ he says. ‘I had a forecast prepared by 8.30am and I updated that again in time for the sailors’ briefing at midday.’ Then through the afternoon he was
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