The WeatherPresenter Concept

We all appreciate the importance of real-time in today’s broadcast world. Weather, as one of the most important features of our television schedules also has its place in the real-time world. MeteoGroup have spent several years in planning our strategy for this all-important market and great deal of development time has gone into the creating our product for this market, WeatherPresenter.WeatherPresenter is a one-stop real-time application for weather forecasting, with three simple, yet essential components:

• Nowcast
• Forecast
• Playcast

Nowcast
The major part of any weather show is the weather forecast, but we believe differentiation plays an increasing part in broadcast strategy. In interest of setting the scene within your weather show and of providing general educational background for your viewers, MeteoGroup’s real-time world begins with a look at how the weather has been developing in recent hours. “Nowcasting” is the buzzword and it is achieved via the MeteoEarth module of WeatherPresenter. MeteoEarth (www.meteoearth.com) enables us to cover world weather news events such as the hurricane currently crossing the Gulf of Mexico or the Arctic winter which has been engulfing Europe in recent days. How have these phenomena progressed recently and how are they likely to affect our forecast for the coming days? MeteoEarth is equipped with high-resolution textures which permit a speedy transgression from global to regional visualisations which in itself allows for a smooth transition to the forecast for your local region or country.

Forecast
Local maps of your country or region are specifically designed for you particular TV station. Onto these the presenter can add a wide variety of weather symbols, fronts, highs and lows and much more. The idea is of course that the story behind the weather forecast evolves as the presentation develops (as elements are successively added to the maps). Zooming, panning and the pause/continue animation function are further tools enabling the presenter to home in on specific forecasted weather developments.

The presentation itself can be managed in two ways. The elements mentioned can be added manually using touchscreen interaction, or they are programmed to be triggered or automatically run just minutes before going on air.

Playcast
With our integrated real-time play-out system, it is also possible to add additional weatherclips.tv content to any real-time weather show. A pre-rendered 3D flight or a video showing a weather situation unfolding live might be inserted at any point for example.