The Met Office generates vast quantities of data on the way to delivering forecasts and climate predictions. Much of this data (more than 60Gb per day) is distributed already in some way — either to other meteorological and climate organisations, or to people for whom the weather can have an impact. The Met Office website is also very popular, especially at times of significant weather events, such as the snow of February 2009 when there were nearly 20 million visits to the site. This year the Met Office has significantly expanded capabilities to distribute data with advisories, warnings and alerts available as RSS feeds, email, Twitter (and, via Twitter, SMS), and a range of platform specific tools such as those for Google, Firefox and Windows Vista/7. Forecast information will also be using these channels early next year. See here for more information.
The interpretation of weather data can be a highly skilled task, particularly if that data is computer generated model outputs or observation data such as satellite or radar information. Research suggests many requests for data are not to re-use or add value to the data in any way, but simply to visualise it. Many websites would like to offer their users local or contextual weather and, until now, the only choice available to them has been to develop their own web-based weather visualisation applications based on a subscribed weather data feed. The Met Office will continue to supply weather data and indeed plans to widen the catalogue of data available to the general public over the coming months, but this is often not what website owners want.
To meet this need, the Met Office has released the first of a new series of “Weather Widgets”. These tools are primarily aimed at website owners and operators who may only have a limited web development capability. A simple to use web wizard here, walks users through the configuration of a weather visualisation tool. It is possible to select the location of interest, number of forecast days and more besides. It is even possible to include simple radar imagery, animated precipitation forecasts, isobaric charts and temperature maps into the widget. When the configuration is completed, a small piece of script is generated that can be embedded into the host website, allowing the user to present a professional and polished weather tool at no cost to them. As the Met Office serves the content on behalf of the host site, there are also no ongoing running costs to the host website.
Much of the technology to support the gadgets was developed in the Met Office public innovation environment, called “Invent”, where new ways to visualise and distribute weather content are always being developed and tested — so visit often to catch the latest in weather technology.
Charlie Ewen - Head of Web Business and Service at the Met Office.
