The European Space Agency (ESA) is part funding a £1.5 million project to develop MIDAS (Marine Information and Data Access Service), a ground breaking weather service for yachtsmen.

The aim of the project is to develop a commercial service that will provide yachtsmen with a single source of integrated weather forecast and other marine information, whether they are surfing the web at home before sailing or using a laptop or a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) on board their boat.

In addition to providing normal weather forecasts at a variety of resolutions, the service will also allow access to near-real time weather reports from ships and land stations, near-real time data from Earth observation satellites (such as cloud cover, sea temperature, wind speed and direction), and tide/current data. The service will be available through a standard web browser for terrestrial users or through a special MIDAS client for use on-board from Marine Computing.