By Michael Murrie

For years weather graphics visualized the present and the past. About the only images depicting the future were little sun and cloud icons on the forecast graphics.

Weather graphics have come a long way since then. We now animate moving maps, fly through three-dimensional clouds, and visualize computerized forecast models. Storm tracking shows exactly where and when storms will hit. Radar projection systems show the paths of oncoming storms. And visualized forecasting gives viewers a life-like view of what the weather will be like outside their window.

Storm Tracking
During severe weather, precise forecasts are crucial to viewers. Originally, storm tracking software provided short-term text forecasts of where a storm would hit. Now, they're much more sophisticated, integrating radar and richer imagery. Weather Central's StormSentinel, for example, automatically plots storm positions and intensities in real time. It displays satellite and wind velocity data graphically, as well as radar from up to four sites. An additional feature, MagicTrack, allows the meteorologist to be on camera while controlling the tracking system, even zooming in on or drawing the storm path with his hand.

Baron Services automates storm-tracking analysis with its FasTrac Millennium system. It processes radar data in real time and automatically prioritizes the most serious storm cells for the meteorologist, zooming in on them.

Radar Forecasts
Close cousins to storm tracking are the systems that project Doppler radar data into the near future, from 15 minutes to an hour. These systems are very reliable projecting five to 15 minutes, but become a bit less reliable at longer time periods. The basic technology for these systems comes from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Baron Services marketing director Kim Grantham describes the company's FutureScan as "a cross between a storm track and a time lapse." Viewers see Doppler radar data moving into the future. Kavouras has a similar system called DopplerCast. Broadcast sales manager Pete Sappanos says the technology, which predicts growth and decay of storms as well as their movements, is used by the Federal Aviation Administration and American Airlines. "You can go from the current radar image and say, 'Let's look at what the computer's projecting in 20 minutes.'" DopplerCast enables the viewer to see radar projections from a wide view, or it can zoom down to street level.

Visualized Forecasts
Beyond these advancements, the holy grail of weather forecasting graphics has been to eliminate those text/icon forecasts and display forecasts in ways that average viewers can understand, as if they were looking out the window at the next day's weather. At least two systems visualize the weather this way. WSI calls it a "fundamentally new paradigm for weather presentation."

Sam Scaman, chief meteorologist at KMSP-TV in Minneapolis, calls it the realization of a dream he's had for 10 years. He waited for the right technology to come along, and when it did, he and others started a weather visualization company, ScapeWare 3d. Its product, called Visual Forecast, goes beyond visualizing the computer model to allow the meteorologist to visualize a forecast with images of clouds, precipitation, fog, wind speed and direction, temperatures and sunrise/sunset. "This product for the first time gives viewers an opportunity to see the weather before its happens. It's a future time lapse."

The system uses 25-meter resolution Landsat images, although it can use resolution as high as one meter from Ikonos. The system has an "easy tier" for a less experienced weathercaster and an "advanced tier" for the seasoned meteorologist.

WSI has introduced a similar new product called Skycast to visualize forecasts. It takes metrics from a WSI computer model and/or the local meteorologist's forecast and maps the information to video clips. Again, these animated time-lapse forecast images are integrated with satellite imagery and a skyline or recognizable landmark.

WNYT-TV in Albany, NY, likes Skycast because it has features that work well in a diverse geographic market. The station's coverage area includes mountains and other geographical features that influence weather. "So there are variations that are noteworthy each day, especially during the winter," says news director Paul Conti. "One of the things we like about Skycast is that we can get little cityscapes or some kind of picture that will represent an area like Bennington, VT, or Pittsfield, MA¾places that look different¾and we can create specific forecasts for each."

Conti, whose station tested Skycast, says there are hundreds of different sky images that you can animate. Rendering the complicated images typically takes 20 minutes, he says. "We wish it would render faster than it does. It's not a fault of the software. You're asking a lot of things to happen and the computer has only so much power, but the end product is worth it."

Although Skycast will visualize a computer forecast model, WNYT doesn't use the capability. "We prefer, since we have a staff of five meteorologists, to go with our own forecasts," Conti says.

Web Weather
Weather, especially radar, is the highest traffic feature for local television and radio news web sites. And features and gadgets have emerged to make web weather even more interesting and useful.

Web versions of visualized forecasts such as WSI's Skycast or Scapeware's Visual Forecast are supposed to be available soon. Another unique web service that has been popular this year is My-Cast, which allows users to configure a highly localized forecasts tailored to their activities.

Then there are the weather monitors that sit on the desktops of personal computers. ItWorks's product of this kind is called NowCaster. It displays all kinds of images (radar, forecast maps) and weather or news bulletins as crawls, popups and audio alerts. The display can include promos, ads and links to web sites.

When KSNW-TV in Wichita, KS, added NowCaster to its site, chief meteorologist Dave Freeman says the response was huge. "We had more than 10,000 downloads in the first five days and haven't counted since," he says. KXAN-TV in Austin, TX, had a similar experience when it introduced a desktop utility called Weather Bug from AWS. More than 4,500 users registered for it in the first two days.

AWS has a network of more than 4,000 automated weather reporting stations at schools. At first they served as stations to gather data on local conditions for television weather reports. Now, many are connected to the Internet, so the Weather Bugs can pass on data from the nearest school reporting station. Weather Bug also relays weather warnings and recently started displaying camera shots of current conditions from the school weather stations.

Wireless Weather
Delivery of weather and news bulletins by e-mail to computers or mobile devices such as PCS phones, pagers or personal digital assistants is a quickly growing area. ItWorks, AWS, AccuWeather, Baron Services and others have added or launched these services.

KSNW uses ItWorks' service, WeatherWarn. "It is dependent on the Internet and on the pager vendors," Freeman says. "So, it is a great supplement to our on-air severe weather coverage, but certainly not a replacement. It is very popular here, and there are even entire police departments that subscribe."

"This service-and many other products and services that rely on decoding the National Weather Service weather wire-are having difficulty right now because of a recent changeover in vendors for the weather wire service," Freeman says. "We are actively working with the NWS, and our vendors, to try to get these difficulties resolved quickly."

DTV to PC
The ultimate wireless is digital television, and in the last year or two there has been a flurry of development activity trying to enable DTV to deliver web content to televisions and personal computers.

WSI, through its web service Intellicast.com, has started a pilot program with Capitol Broadcasting's DTV Plus of Raleigh, NC, to datacast weather to home PCs with DTV receiver cards. Some 200 households are using the service in the trial.

WSI says the information being delivered is "very rich" including forecasts at all levels from national to hyper-local. There are also "lifestyle" weather forecasts for allergy sufferers and for activities such as sailing or golfing.

As for radar displays for DTV, Advanced Design Corporation says its SkyWarn2000 is the first. It runs with Windows and has D-1 quality digital video output (4:2:2).

The Forecast
In the future you can look for more uses of DTV and datacasting to enhance weather presentation. Meanwhile, look for advances in the other areas, too. For example, mobile devices can receive weather warnings, but those warnings are for the home area of the wireless device. What about when you're on the road? Companies such as Lucent Technologies have developed a technology that uses global positioning signals to track certain phone users to within five feet of their actual location. So it won't be long before such information can be combined with weather information to deliver the appropriate warning regardless of where you are.-Michael Murrie is Communicator's products writer. Contact him at michael.murrie@pepperdine.edu.