Canada’s Ocean Supercluster has announced a $1.8 million project led by Halifax-based SailTimer to produce crowd-sourced weather reporting both for and from sailboats.

SailTimer, helmed by President Craig Summers, is currently accepting pre-orders for its own SailTimer Wind Instrument RB. It's the hardware for its own version of a technology similar to that being developed by the supercluster consortium.

The Ocean Supercluster will pay for $536,000 of the project, dubbed Crowdsourced Wind Maps: A New Type of Data for Marine Weather and Navigation, with the rest of the money coming from the private sector partners.

Those companies include Canadian Yachting Media, a magazine publisher, GPS software-maker IIC Technologies and Navcast, which owns a suite of patents related to marine internet-of-things systems, as well as four other international partners.

“Having access to the most accurate data possible is critical to navigation planning and in the consideration of conditions at sea,” said Ocean Supercluster CEO Kendra MacDonald in a statement.

“This project will provide higher resolution wind measurements than ever possible before and combine it with forecast data to supply all marine vessels with the best marine navigation data for safer operations and better decision making.”

The supercluster also said in the statement that crowdsourced wind data is more granular that what can be achieved using satellite imagery, the current industry standard. The system also aims to use data to model probable windspeed in locations even where there is no longer a sailboat with measuring equipment.