'MyObservatory' Hitting the 100 Million Mark

The Hong Kong Observatory (HKO) launched a new location-specific weather service 'MyObservatory' in March 2010. Making use of positioning software to estimate the user's location, this new service automatically displays the latest weather information, including temperature, relative humidity, rainfall, wind direction, wind speed and weather photo, from the nearby weather stations. To better serve the users on the move, mobile PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) and iPhone versions of the 'MyObservatory' are also available.

An upgrade was made available for the 'MyObservatory' iPhone app in July. In response to users' requests, 'MyObservatory' was enhanced with 7-day weather forecast, weather warnings, HKO storm track (Figure 1), satellite and radar images, etc. The 'MyObservatory' iPhone app has become very popular and has been downloaded for more than 260,000 times since launch. The visitor statistics of 'MyObservatory' exceeded 100 million at end October from the launch of the upgrade version in July.

'MyObseratory' could also be used on iPad. Simply enter 'MyObservatory' in the search box at the top right hand corner of the App Store on iPad (Figure 2) for installation of the application.

Figure 1: HKO Storm track on 'MyObservatory'	Figure 2: Enter 'MyObservatory' in the search box at the top right hand corner of the App Store on iPad for installation of the application.