## 5 Development of an Auto-Response Early-Warning System  
### Purpose of the Warning System  
As discussed above, in recent years, cruise-boat-related accidents caused by strong wind gusts have claimed heavy casualties and assets losses in Eastern and Southeastern Asia. This is not in contradiction with the increasing trend of summer daily peak wind gusts over the last 50 years under a warmer surface atmosphere [28].  
The robustness of vessels against strong winds/waves varies greatly with a lot of factors, including tonnage, size, age, carrier product, structure, etc. Inland and offshore cruise boats generally have less than 1000 gross-tonnage and thus are less resistant to strong wind gusts but are also much closer to the harbor and anchorage, so the early warning service with a lead time of 2 to 48 h is highly critical and applicable. In the \"Oriental Star\" case, if the captain had anchored one hour in advance, then the tragedy would have highly likely been avoided because all other nearby small ships were not capsized. However, currently, commercial weather routing services, with professional and ship-oriented fame, are requested by transoceanic shipping companies and are somewhat expensive. As a result, cruise boats have very limited adverse-weather warning other than the open access information. Even for very large vessels, sudden extreme weather may also cause a large impact in a shallow channel. For example, it is arguable that at 8 am on 23 March 2021, a sudden strong convective gust may have been responsible the ULCC (Ultra Large Container Carrier) \"Even Given\" to be stuck in the Egypt Suez Canal, resulting in a week-long closure of the channel, and interruption of the whole world's supply chain.  
But open-access weather services, though free of charge, have limitations too. The weather reports in ECG or NAVTEX are described in text mode while the weather fax map is graphical and non-quantitative. In short, these weather services could only describe the regional synoptic weather condition and were not ship-oriented. As a result, the effect of the weather-related self-navigation was highly dependent on senior officer's personal experience. One analysis shows more than 80% of marine accidents in the maritime domain are caused by human errors [29].  
Based on raw surface 2 m wind component from the numerical weather products and INMARSAT satellite email communication, the Climate Forecast Applications Network group (CFAN) in the Georgia Institute of Technology in the USA developed an automatic marine wind forecast system [30], adding up wave and swell values latterly. Some other sail weather providers could provide similar service too, but it would only free for a limited trial time. However, as discussed in Section 3.2 and Figure 2, the product based on raw surface wind data do not contain warning potential for extreme wind gusts, particularly when related to convective events. Upon the finding in this study, this study adjusted the previous wind forecasting system to add up the state-of-the-art nautical CP and LSP forecast, with the aim of providing deep-convective wind gust warning to cruise boat officers via email communication.