"Weather Wizard" - page views reaching 5 million a day in 2010

20 January 2011

The "Weather Wizard" service launched in May 2008 has become very popular with page views in 2010 reaching a high of 1.8 billion (Figure 1), in other words, about 5 million a day. This figure was about 20% higher than that in 2009.

The "Weather Wizard" is a simple-to-use PC-based gadget. With this gadget, users can select a location in Hong Kong to display the hourly air temperature and relative humidity readings from that location. At regular intervals, "Weather Wizard" retrieves the latest weather information and warnings from HKO web servers, and displays them on the Toolbar at the bottom of the user's computer screen (Figure 2). A dialog box will pop up with an audio alarm to alert users when there is a change in the warning status.

"Weather Wizard" and its user and installation guide can be downloaded from the HKO website at: http://www.weather.gov.hk/wxinfo/wxwizard/wxwizard.htm .

Figure 1. Page views of "Weather Wizard" from 2008 to 2010

Figure 2. Display of "Weather Wizard" showing Sha Tin's latest weather conditions at that time.