Every forecast your plan allows is used for a route. The Model picker chooses which answer you are looking at. Currents, waves, and depth are different: they modify or constrain each wind-based route rather than producing candidates of their own.
The consensus
Left on Consensus, the panel shows the track the models broadly agree on and names which model that recommendation came from. Open the picker to step through the individual models and see what each would have had you do.
This is the useful part. A single forecast gives you a course to steer. Several give you a course to steer and a measure of how much to trust it. When they part company, you know before the start that the race has a real decision in it, and you can plan a hedge.
Departure scans are worked out on the consensus, and the panel says so.
Wind and pressure
NOAA GFS — global forecast, updated several times a day.
NOAA HRRR — US coasts and the Great Lakes, updated hourly. Its finer detail picks up sea breezes, lake effects and terrain channelling that coarser global models smooth out. On All-out it is used at its finest available detail.
NOAA NAM (CONUS nest) — the same US area as HRRR, from a second forecast system. Beyond its own horizon its candidate continues under GFS, as HRRR's does. NOAA plans to replace NAM with its RRFS model; when that happens, the NAM candidate will simply stop appearing. Nothing else depends on it.
ECMWF IFS — global forecast from ECMWF's open data. Often the stronger model in the 2 to 5 day range, and the standard second opinion against GFS.
ECMWF AIFS — ECMWF's AI forecast system, run alongside IFS. It is built differently, so it works as a third opinion rather than a second copy of IFS.
Availability depends on your plan, the model's coverage, the time you ask for, and whether a complete forecast has been published. A regional model that does not cover the course simply does not appear.
Currents
NOAA RTOFS supplies ocean surface currents for set and drift. It has no Great Lakes coverage.
NOAA supplies tidal currents for supported US coastal waters and the Great Lakes, from the regional forecast that covers your course. Both current sources add to the wind forecast: they are used alongside it, not as separate answers.
Waves
NOAA wave forecasts supply sea state where your plan includes waves. The route reports the waves it meets. Wave avoidance and a maximum-wave limit can steer the route toward calmer water, but waves are not added as a separate speed penalty: the boat's performance is taken to already reflect the conditions.
Depth
Depth comes from combined public charts and bathymetry:
- GEBCO, a global ocean depth model, for offshore water. It keeps long ocean routes off seamounts and says nothing about anywhere you could run aground.
- NOAA grids for the Great Lakes. Lake depth comes from these, not from the global model.
- NOAA nautical chart data for inshore depth contours.
The draft on your certificate is used against it. This is a planning constraint and not a navigational one. See the terms.
Reference height
Wind is reported at the standard 10 m height, the height polars are quoted against, so the wind numbers match those on your certificate.
Ensemble spread
Some deployments show an experimental band under Route stability. It shows how much the ensemble forecasts disagree about the wind along a route that has already been computed. It does not compute an alternative route or choose a hedge.
Further ensemble routing work is in research and is not yet a customer feature.