Weather Impact on Fuel Consumption: Waves, Wind and Your Vessel

Wind and waves slow a vessel down and raise its fuel consumption. MANTRAZ records sea conditions at every GPS point and puts them next to vessel performance, so operators and fleet managers can see the weather impact on fuel consumption for themselves and tell weather from waste.

Weather gets blamed for everything, or for nothing

When consumption goes up on a voyage, there are two easy explanations: the sea was rough, or the vessel was run poorly. Without a record of the conditions the vessel actually met, both are guesses. The weather becomes either an excuse nobody can check or a real cause that gets ignored, and neither leads to a useful conversation.

How MANTRAZ records the weather

Every GPS point the vessel sends carries a record of the sea around it:

• wave height
• wave period
• wave direction

On top of that, MANTRAZ warns about head seas, beam seas and extreme waves, and rates the sea state. Because the conditions are tied to the vessel's own GPS points, they describe the water the vessel was actually in, along its own track.

Measuring the weather impact on fuel consumption

The weather data is placed next to performance and shown on a weather map, so conditions and consumption can be read together. When fuel use climbs and the wave warnings line up with it, the weather is a fair explanation. When fuel use climbs in calm water, the cause is somewhere else, and the engine data, operation modes and track are the next places to look.

That is the point of the feature: not to excuse high consumption, but to separate what the sea did from what the vessel did.

Weather in voyage reports

Every MANTRAZ voyage report includes the wave conditions met on the way, alongside distance, average speed, litres per nautical mile and fuel per running hour. When you put two voyages side by side, you can see whether they faced similar seas before drawing conclusions about how each one was sailed.

Who uses it

Fleet managers use weather data to judge performance fairly across vessels and voyages. Operations teams use the warnings and sea state rating to understand the conditions a vessel went through. When a crew says a voyage was hard going, the office can see the same conditions instead of taking it on trust or dismissing it.

See it on the map

The weather chapter on the MANTRAZ homepage lets you toggle the weather on and off to compare the same vessel in different conditions. To see weather next to performance for your own fleet, contact the team for a demo.