Cruising World reviews Cornells' Atlas second edition - a navigator's essential tool

Anyone planning an extended voyage will find a useful tool in the just-updated and rerelased second edition of Cornells’ Ocean Atlas, a book choked-full of pilot charts and tips for sailing the world’s ocean.

The book is the handiwork of author and circumnavigator Jimmy Cornell and his son, Ivan, also a sailor and a computer scientist who developed a program to collect and process weather data from a number of sources, including NOAA satellite observations.

The Cornells published their first collection of pilot charts in 2012, based on 20 years’ worth of satellite data. Previously, pilot charts relied mostly on shipboard weather observations.

The new atlas includes 80 monthly pilot charts, showing wind speed and direction, currents, the extent of the Intertropical Convergence Zone, common tracks of tropical storms and the mean location of high-pressure cells in each hemisphere. There are also 60 detailed charts of the most commonly sailed ocean routes.

And the book has been reformatted to introduce monthly windgrams for those routes that summarize the information in each rose wind along the way.

While Lady Luck often determines if you’ll be in the right place at the right time, Cornells’ Ocean Atlas can help you avoid being in the wrong place in the wrong season – the goal of every navigator.